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Jann Rosen-Queralt

Multidisciplinary, Multidisciplinary Art, Sculpture / Installation, Visual / Media

Awards Received

Individual Artist

2014

Interdisciplinary artist with 40 years of experience creating public artwork, monumental sculpture, and multi-media installations.

About the Artist

Jann Rosen-Queralt is an artist, avid scuba diver and researcher whose interdisciplinary artwork integrates structures, biological processes, and ecological systems to trigger public action and awareness. Driven by a robust curiosity, her concepts reveal unseen – yet unifying – details and occurrences in nature. Some examples are: Percolare, a sculpture that feeds a rain garden, Raleigh, NC. and Confluence, a kinetic sculpture celebrating water cleansing at the Brightwater Wastewater Treatment facility in Seattle, WA. Rosen-Queralt’s artwork has been supported by a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2018), a Marcella Brenner grant for research at the Center for Creative Photography in Arizona (2022), and an art and science residency in the Arctic Circle (2023). A career educator, Rosen-Queralt retired from the Maryland Institute College of Art after 43 years. She maintains a corner lot garden in Baltimore City, where she lives with her husband Phil and their two cats.

Jann Rosen-Queralt website Artist Website Jann Rosen-Queralt website Baker Artist Portfolio

Artist's Statement

I believe that cross disciplinary discussion and interaction is the lifeblood of both art and science. In sharing their perspectives and approaches to the world, artists and scientists can support and challenge one another toward a brighter future. One of my earliest and most formative experiences as a citizen scientist included scuba diving with renowned ichthyologist, Eugenie Clark, over a period of 14 years. Since then, I have collaborated with an independent curator at Fairmount Waterworks Interpretive Center creating materials for public awareness of macro-invertebrates in the Schuylkill River watershed (2017). This led to a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2018) where I had the pleasure of working with scientists studying zooplankton and filter feeders at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Lastly, I led nature walks with ecologists pointing out interrelated threads in the ecosystem along the Jones Falls, a tributary into the Chesapeake Bay (2019), which was part of a national environmental program, Call Walks. I have gained immeasurable knowledge from engaging in these science and art collaborations. The result is that I continue to be motivated to heighten human awareness about ecological networks, their impact on living systems, and the influence of organisms on their environment.

Featured Work

Photos

This immersive sculpture and video installation is inspired by the Greek myth, Jason and the Argonauts’ Quest for the Golden Fleece. The sculpture references the Argonauts’ ship, Argos, and the narrative for the video approximates the hero’s journey. Similar to the challenges Jason faced in order to accomplish his mission, the themes of the video are: the power and beauty of water, industrial pollution, storm water runoff, and agricultural water use. Projected on the exterior of the massive sculpture, the installation presents viewers with the regions’ changing water systems. Video is projected on both sides while the interior is alive with a changing LED light sequence. In the bottom photo, members of the public move through Argo during the Light City Baltimore Festival. The top photo shows the exterior of the piece at a moment in the video which highlights explosions, one of the dangers of fracking and the oil and gas industry. In effort to broaden the reach and underscore the concept of awareness and participation in advocacy for water health and quality, Argo included performances and workshops involving poets, musicians, performers, and the Maryland Science Center. Argo was a collaboration between myself, Marian Ochoa, and Kirsten Walsh. The project was commissioned by the Baltimore Office of Promotion and Art.
Underwater photographs from my diving trips are digitally composited and then stitched into umbrellas. The works are designed to exist at many scales and can be installed as a grouping of pieces which are hung from the ceiling, sprouting from the ground or protruding from the wall. The creatures that are the subject of my photographs are indicator species, or "umbrella species", whose general health in an environment indicate overall ecological health. Unsung Heroes creates a context for humans to think of themselves as an umbrella species because we are stewards of the earth with the potential to protect or neglect indicator species like those featured through our implementation of policy and steering conservation and its effectiveness. All this underscores that through protecting umbrella species, we can indirectly protect the other orders that make up an ecological habitat.
Commissioned by the City of Raleigh Arts Commission to be integrated into the Sandy Forks Road Widening Project, Raleigh, NC. Budget: $71,250.00 Percolare is sited beside a bio-retention pond. The design is a response to the environmental rehabilitation integrated into this Greenroads project (LEED rated) to highlight the passage of rain and storm water easily visible to pedestrians and automotive traffic. Composed of shapes and surfaces reminiscent of strainers and sieves, the piece mimics the distillation process occurring in the bio-retention basin. Inspired by the natural filtration process occurring in the basin, the three elements of the sculpture collect filter and release water during wet weather. During dry periods without water flow, the shapes and surfaces may remind one of distillation vessels, strainers, and sieves. Elements of the sculpture are both permeable and solid providing the means to collect and release water into the surrounding region.
At the heart of this photograph is an icosahedron (or 20-sided polyhedron); the symbol for water in Plato’s cosmology of the universe. This element is situated in a landscape and is clad in detritus such as tires and plastics that commonly pollute and threaten our water.
This project involves a collection of photographs titled A Sparrow on the Floor of a Cathedral (ASFC). Intended to be shared in many contexts as a matter of the concept, photographs from ASFC could be displayed on gallery walls, accessed online via QR codes for on-the-go viewing, or installed at mural size in public transit hubs like bus stops or airports. This project reveals an unknown realm, as boundless as the American west, both enticing for its beauty and jeopardized due to pollution, development and extraction of resources. I have made further conceptual connections between this project and the work of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) photographers like Thomas O’ Sullivan, leading to the inclusion of accompanying information. USGS photographers diligently recorded the locations and other information relevant to the capture of their photographs, and it is my belief that sharing information such as the location, voyage and date of capture of my images further ties the photograph to its physical reality. The goal is to create a pause, a collective inhale – for the audience to consider the ways in which their basic functions, relationships and understanding of the world may or perhaps should change after an other-worldly encounter with the deep.
In A Sparrow on the Floor of the Cathedral, I am the sparrow looking up through the water column into the virtuosity of natures’ cathedral; immersing the viewer beneath the ocean’s surface. These aquatic environments host natural resources which humans have or are actively extracting. Owing to their relative anonymity and inaccessibility these frontiers have been portrayed as “romantic”, mythical and untouched wildernesses.

Videos

  • Argo (video documentation)

    See more information about Argo (video documentation)
    Commissioned for Light City Baltimore by the Baltimore Office of Promotion and Arts, this collaboration with Marian Ochoa and Kirsten Walsh was supported by the Maryland Science Center, in front of which it is sited. The immersive sculpture and video installation is inspired by the Greek myth, Jason and the Argonauts Quest for the Golden Fleece. The sculpture references the Argonauts’ ship, Argos, and the narrative for the video approximates the hero’s journey while exploring the power and beauty of water, industrial pollution, storm water runoff and agricultural water use. While the video projected on both sides of the exterior focuses on catalysts for change to the regions' water systems, Argo's interior is illuminated by programmed LED lights to compound the immersive experience of the work.
    Medium: Wood, LED lights, video projection
    Year: 2017
    Details: 55" x 22" x 11"

  • Food Cycle

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    Except of Food Cycle.

    “Food Cycle” is a composition in the suite, Water Sonettos. It is one of three short constructs that elaborate upon the matrix of life, water. The video traces relationships between water and food production on several continents. The soundtrack is composed of field recordings and Le Prophete, a Bel canto opera, sung by Sigrid Onegin. The long passages of simple melody alternate with elaborate vocal scrollwork to heighten the dramatic meaning and the urgency of our potential water crisis.
    Medium: Video
    Year: 2012
    Details: clip length: 59 seconds. Total Duration: 4 minutes 56 seconds.

  • Jewels of the River

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    excerpt of Jewels of the River
    Medium: Video
    Year: 2017

Written Works