Statement
My work situates itself in the liminal border-space between the physical and virtual, science and magic, humans and technology, and memory and imagination. My practice incorporates archival and investigative video and animation, as well as new media technologies, such as photogrammetry, into large-scale installations. My works investigate our individual relationships with current radical shifts in digital technology and scientific fields. I explore phenomena such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, astro, particle and quantum physics, proposing through them metaphors for memory, dreams, loss and love in the human experience, and extrapolating these connections to imagine a sort of posthuman humanism.
My projects employ various digital fabrication techniques, including scanning, 3D printing, and projection mapping. I combine these techniques with video, new media, and practical projection effects, using my experiments to investigate the divide between the physical and digital, examining memory and loss and how they may be freshly understood through notions of the glitch, degeneration and resurrection. The audio components of my works largely draw from personal, historical, and scientific archival material, adopting mixing and sampling techniques to examine how entertainment media and science culture become entangled with our notions of ourselves, our relationships with technology, and our communication with others.
I have been asking myself these questions: how can we express and embrace our entanglements with the rest of the universe? What potential lies in the ways our systems glitch, our minds break down, and our bodies age? What is lost in the voids between the physical, digital, and spiritual? How do we define what is ‘human’ and how might we encapsulate the ‘human’ experience in other media and forms? How might we communicate through media and form notions of love, grief, and hope across differences, species, or even across planets? How can we grieve what cannot be encapsulated, that which we cannot understand, or that which is lost in translation? And how do we find beauty, even opportunity, in our own inherent entropy?
Bio
Mia Rollins was born in Nashville, TN in 1995. Though they grew up in the South, at the age of fifteen, Rollins moved to the Northeast to pursue a career in competitive figure skating. Rollins received their BA in Visual Art and Modern Culture and Media from Brown University in 2017. From 2018 to 2019, Rollins worked as an elementary school visual art teacher. Their time as a teacher gave them great interest in how children tackle questions about identity and place through their perception of artworks, scientific phenomena, and their own creations. Rollins recently received their M.F.A. in Sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design in 2022.
Rollins's work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including the 2021 RISD MFA Biennial in Providence, RI, the 2019 Art of the South exhibition at Memphis College of Art, the 2021 “Hypothesis” exhibition at the Torpedo Factory Arts Center in Alexandria, VA, and the Chashama Gallery’s “Inheritance” show in New York in 2022. In 2021, Rollins exhibited their solo show, "Phantasmagoria" at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth, NH. Rollins’ first international solo exhibition, Dream Like Cherenkov” was presented this year at Galerie Siedlarek in Frankfurt, Germany.
As a large part of Rollins’ practice is advocating for the incorporation of artists’ perspectives in STEM research, Residencies and collaborations with scientific and technological research projects are integral to their practice. From 20221-2022, Rollins was the Artist in Residence at the Rhode Island Nuclear Science Center, researching Cherenkov radiation, gamma spectroscopy, and cosmic radiation.
Currently, Rollins is the Artist in Collaboration with the Flow Physics Facility at the University of New Hampshire, working alongside a team of physicists to develop new methods of flow imaging using projection mapping and smoke holography. The project has received a NASA SCoPE Seed Grant 2023 grant to turn the installation into an interactive VR lesson on flow physics to be available for middle and highschool teachers on NASA’s Infiniscope teaching platform and culminated in a large installation inside the wind tunnel in Summer 2023. Rollins is a founding member of the Brown University Space Program, which launched SBUDNIC, a small satellite, into space in June 2022. They are also a Professor of Engineering Graphics, Blueprint Design, and Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing in the Department of Physics and Engineering at the Community College of RI.
Gallery: https://www.galerie-siedlarek.com/