Systems that live forever. Our DNA is composed of relics. Of what life once was. These are the handwritten phrases found in Anastasia Komar’s studio while in residence at Fountainhead. Taped adjacent to intimate graphite sketches and work on display, the makeshift studio feels like a mass lab of the artist’s brain on view. In speaking with Komar, I learn of how she dedicates one hour in her morning routine to sketching and drawing what she finds in her computer research, and how these phrases come from the articles and podcasts she reads and listens to across the Internet. Sourcing from synthetic biology and bioengineering, her interest centers on the digestibility of science through the storytelling of her layered compositions. Electroplated and glass polymer weave its way around the acrylic on board works in odes to the subjects that she pulls from her research—everything from flowers to the vertebrae of sea creatures.

There is no pressure to understand the science on view as Komar interprets what is witnessed in the online photographs and studies of contemporary scientific fields. Waves of electromagnetic fields are painted with delicate movement, appearing abstract in presentation. In combining the board of her works with the hand-manipulated elements, a dialogue begins about what inherently exists in the natural world and what is controlled by human touch. Nature is inherently violent, a reality that Komar acknowledges in the scientific subjects that she dissects visually. In addressing the aesthetic beauty of what science uncovers, there’s the tangible pain and growth development of how life plays out that needs to occur in these discoveries. As she talks about preventative cancer medicine and disputes between researchers, Komar returns to this idea of hope at the core of it all in investigating our own limitations and individual mortality through her practice.