Shana Mabari is an American contemporary artist with a studio practice based in Los Angeles.  Previously, she has also lived and worked in Paris, Ibiza, Northern India, Southeast Asia, and Tel Aviv. Central to Mabari’s process is her ongoing investigation of the intersections of art and science, as evidenced by her sculptures, installations, and immersive environments that explore the dynamics of visual perception and the ways in which we experience physical space. 

The artist’s engagement with color, light, reflection, and geometric form are on a continuum that connects with the Light and Space movement that originated in California in the 1960s. Her vision of an expanded practice in the twenty-first century centers on exploring how the space of art making and viewing might productively intersect with what are otherwise often highly technical and advanced scientific fields, such as astrophysics and psychophysics. 

In 2004, Mabari and Dr. Shinsuke Shimojo of the California Institute of Technology were awarded a patent for the design of Dynamic Spatial Illusions, a portable version of a visual-and-sensory experimental environment, and the artist has ongoing collaborations with experts in the vision sciences at Caltech and in the neurosciences at Zurich’s Institute of Neuroinformatics. 

In 2018, Mabari was selected to be the first artist to fly aboard a mission of NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), which uses a 2.7-meter telescope mounted in a customized 747 flying to a maximum altitude of 45,000 feet to study such astronomical phenomena as black holes and star formation. 

The experience led to another groundbreaking artist residency in 2020, with the marine conservation non-profit organization Sea Shepherd Global. Mabari embedded aboard one of the Sea Shepherd Global’s missions in the Gulf of Guinea off the west coast of Africa, part of their ongoing efforts to combat illegal fishing in the waters of Benin.  The voyage resulted in the arrest of a trawler for violating the protected waters near an ecological reserve. 

Mabari’s own intersections with advanced scientific fields, from astrophysics to marine conservation, fuel her exploration of the complexities of the contemporary individual’s relationship to the ways in which these disciplines have dramatically expanded our collective field of vision and understanding of physical reality.