My art is motivated by the visual language of the brain sciences; the amorphous landscape of thin slices of biological tissue under the microscope, the “pop” pseudo colours of brain scans, the painstaking stipples and hatches of woodcut illustrations in ancient textbooks, the bold typographical style of symbols, numbers, notations and the meandering reconstructions of neuronal morphologies. These forms are suffused with a multitude of meanings and expositions as dictated by the scientific discourse. In my art, I explore alternate meanings of these visual features, de-contextualized from their scientific paradigms. My art is either a reconfiguration or direct remapping of visual elements like anatomical images, scientific figures, charts, graphs, pictographs, brain scans, etc to suggest  new meanings. The resulting representation can expand the scope of the originally intended meanings to include a wider gamut of phenomena to which science is only covertly connected; the socio-political structures, class hierarchies, cognitive biases, and history. I use techniques like woodcut printmaking, monoprints, digital and analog collages to explore  ideas at the intersection of science, art, and culture.  By altering the visual language of science, the message is subjected to an experiment not dissimilar to the scientific process itself. This unpredictable process could either amplify, obfuscate or radically transform the message culminating in something absurd or insightful. 

I am an Assistant Teaching Professor at the Centre for Cognitive and Brain Science at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Gandhinagar, India, where my research interests include multisensory tactile perception, aesthetic perception and design creativity. I have a PhD in Neuroscience from National Brain Research Centre (India) and a post-doctoral research fellowship from Harvard Medical School (Boston, USA).

For details about my academic research, please see – http://cogs.iitgn.ac.in/member/leslee-lazar/

Click on the link below for a news article about my art.