Uploaded September 2010 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
The Carnegie Center for Art and History in New Albany, Indiana is pleased to present exhibit, Possumhaw Plant Electrics: Drawings and Videos by Julia Oldham, on display August 27 through October 23, 2010. Julia Oldham was selected as Bernheim Arboretum's 2010 Artist in Residence [www.bernheim.org], and during her residency she created a series of videos that combine science fiction and performance. Oldham developed a fictional identity as a technician for Possumhaw Plant Electrics, a company that specializes in measuring radio/electrical emanations from plant forms. Under this guise, she pursued a series of four strange experiments on the arboretum grounds. In her video Radio Prairie, she attempts to locate radio signals in a recently burned prairie landscape; Amplified Colony is a sonic and performative exploration of a carpenter ant nest in a rotting stump; in Radioactive Fairytale she is attached to wildflowers with copper wires and contorts her body to receive outer space signals; and in Reset Oldham attempts to reset the universe by turning cypress knees into electromagnets.
The Carnegie Center for Art and History in New Albany, Indiana is pleased to present exhibit, Possumhaw Plant Electrics: Drawings and Videos by Julia Oldham, on display August 27 through October 23, 2010. Julia Oldham was selected as Bernheim Arboretum's 2010 Artist in Residence [www.bernheim.org], and during her residency she created a series of videos that combine science fiction and performance. Oldham developed a fictional identity as a technician for Possumhaw Plant Electrics, a company that specializes in measuring radio/electrical emanations from plant forms. Under this guise, she pursued a series of four strange experiments on the arboretum grounds. In her video Radio Prairie, she attempts to locate radio signals in a recently burned prairie landscape; Amplified Colony is a sonic and performative exploration of a carpenter ant nest in a rotting stump; in Radioactive Fairytale she is attached to wildflowers with copper wires and contorts her body to receive outer space signals; and in Reset Oldham attempts to reset the universe by turning cypress knees into electromagnets.
