Lindsey french is an artist and educator currently based in Pittsburgh, PA, there teaches as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Studio Arts at the University of Pittsburgh, and as an Adjunct Instructor at Carnegie Mellon University in the School of Art. She earned her BA through an interdisciplinary Course of study, Environment, Interaction, and Design, at Hampshire College, and an MFA in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Her research-based practice engages with multi-sensory and multi-species signaling to consider positions of listening, receptivity, and marginality as valid and active political and communicative positions. Drawing from media studies, olfaction, botany, field recording practices, and ecology, she makes collaborative live-streamed sonic and video performances, radio and scent transmissions, and multi-sensory installations made for plant perception.
She has shared her work nationally in museums and galleries including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) and the International Museum of Surgical Science (Chicago), Pratt Manhattan Gallery (New York), and in conjunction with the International Symposium of Electronics Arts (Albuquerque and Vancouver). Recent solo shows include As long as the grass at the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, PA, and phytovision at Space p11 in Chicago. Her scent and radio broadcast, Signal to Nose, will be presented in Spring 2021 as part of Concordia University’s Uncommon Senses symposium.
Recent and forthcoming publications include:
“Olfaction as Radical Collaboration.” Olfactory Art and The Political in an Age of Resistance. Ed. Debra Parr and Gwenn-Ael Lynn. Routledge. (forthcoming 2021)
”Plant Media and Practices of Receptivity.” Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape and the Postnatural, Ed. David Salomon, Kathy Velikov, Chris Perry, Cathryn Dwyre. Actar, (forthcoming 2021)
”Radio Perfume,” EnCOUnTErs, curated by Helen Frosi. (forthcoming 2021)
”In formation: Microphenomonology as a Technology of Memory,” with Elke Mark, Algorithmische und à¤sthetische Bildung (Informative-Algorithmic Education), Ed. Lydia Schulze Heuling, Christian Filk, Barbara Budrich, Leverkusen, (forthcoming 2021).
Contributor to ”Mobility and Exchange” Questionnaire, by Paula Victoria Kupfer and Jake Eisensmith, Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, History of Art & Architecture, University of Pittsburgh, Edition 9: Moving Across/Through Cultures, March 2021
”signal to nose,” Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts Quarterly, Q29: SILENCE, Ed. Meghan Moe Beitiks, Fall 2020.
”they didn’t bring enough water,” with Willy Smart, DRAIN Magazine, Ecology of Bad Ideas. Ed. Alex Young and Paul Lloyd Sargent, Vol 16, 2020
Contributor to ”Survey for White Artists,” by Ruby T and Latham Zearfoss, MONDAY, University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design, Guest Ed. Danny Giles, Vol. 4, 2020.