© Ann Cutting

For the Art + Science Competition entitled States of Change, we asked to see photography that examines art and science through transition, transformation, and instability. Change may be gradual or abrupt, visible or difficult to perceive, ranging from emotional shifts to environmental conditions. We invited artists to consider how photography can reveal states of change—where boundaries are not fixed and conditions are continually shifting.

Ann Cutting’s photographs from the series Threshold are connected by a quiet underlying current, a visual language that moves fluidly between art and science. Her images draw upon systems of color, geometry, repetition, and classification, placing the natural world alongside traces of human history and possibilities for its future. Moving between abstraction and recognition, the photographic and the painterly, Cutting shifts our attention from the macro to the micro. There is a sense that everything in these photographs is in transition, poised to become something else. Yet beneath that change are threads of connection, systems that seem to unite knowledge and time.

© Ann Cutting

These pieces live at thresholds, the moments just before or after something shifts. A DNA strand waits on an empty horizon like a rocket on its pad. Two hands hold a cat’s cradle that could fall apart. A magnolia at full bloom beginning to fade. A globe hangs above a dark, smoking ground. A butterfly is pinned and labeled, held still at the point where a life becomes a specimen.

Most change does not announce itself. It builds quietly until one day things are different, and we wonder when it began. I am interested in change that is hard to see while it is happening: the slow drift of a relationship, a season turning, a body aging, a world warming.

Encaustic is itself a material in constant transition. Beeswax and resin are melted, brushed on, and fused with heat over the photographs, paper, and thread, then harden as they cool. I am drawn to that instability, the sense that what looks finished is only resting between states. Each piece holds a moment mid-transition. Nothing here has ended, it is about change.

© Ann Cutting

© Ann Cutting

© Ann Cutting

© Ann Cutting

Ann Cutting earned a BA in Biochemistry and Cell Biology at UC San Diego and a BFA in Photography at ArtCenter College of Design. She worked as a molecular biologist at Caltech for 20 years. Over the last 30 years her commercial and fine art photography clients have included Harvard Business Review, Lexus, Los Angeles Magazine, Microsoft, Nestlé, Nike, Nikon, Oprah, Science, Sony Music, Time, The Wall Street Journal, Warner Bros. Records, and The Washington Post.

Ann is an Associate Professor in the Photography and Film Department at ArtCenter. She has served on the board of APA and currently sits on the board of advisors for the Los Angeles Center of Photography. Alongside photography, she makes handbuilt and wheel-thrown ceramic vessels, often combining them with her own imagery. She lives and works in California and Maine.

Instagram: @aecutting

© Ann Cutting

© Ann Cutting

© Ann Cutting

© Ann Cutting

© Ann Cutting

About the Jurors:

Linda Alterwitz is an independent interdisciplinary artist with a focus on photography. For over two decades, her work has combined art and science exploring the unseen systems that shape our world and the relationships between humanity, technology, and the natural environment to encourage dialogue around choice, trust, and collective experience. Using a high-resolution thermal camera and other digital and analogue techniques, she visualizes phenomena beyond ordinary perception.

She has exhibited widely in traditional exhibition and site-specific installations at institutions including FORMAT25, Derby, UK; Museum of Art & History, Lancaster, CA – part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide Getty Initiative; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM, among others.

Alterwitz’s work is held in permanent collections including the Institute for Art + Environment, Reno, NV;  Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA; Hilliard Museum of Art, Lafayette, LA; Nelson Atkins Special Collections Library, Kansas City, MO; Santa Barbara Museum of Art Fearing Library, Santa Barbara, CA; Rochester Institute of Technology, Wallace Library, Rochester, NY, among others.

Recent awards include Nevada Arts Council Fellowship for Visual Arts 2025 and 2014, Individual Artist Grant from Healthy Communities Coalition 2023, NV, Individual Artist Grant 2020, Montana Arts Council, among others.

Instagram: @lindaalterwitz

Ben Hickey is the Executive Director for the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts in Buffalo, New York. Previously he was curator of exhibitions and Emily Cyr Bridges Endowed Professor of Art at the Hilliard Art Museum on the campus of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. With over one hundred exhibition credits, artists he has exhibited include Brian Kelly of the Marais Press, Letitia Huckaby, L. Kasimu Harris, Robert C. Tannen, Richard Landry, Pat Phillips, Sonya Clark, Hasan Elahi, Dawoud Bey, and James Surls.

Hickey’s most recent writing can be found in Beili Liu: Mend, a monograph published by the Art League Houston in celebration of Liu’s 2024 Texas Artist of the Year Award. Other essayists include Bridget Bray, Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Eddie Chambers, Katie Pfohl, and Kay Whitney.

In 2023 Hickey received a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Travel Grant to co-present research related to Marais Press on-campus collaborations at the 51st Annual Art Libraries Society of North America in Mexico City. Earlier in his career, he presented Reshaping Our Programming: The Artist in Residence Program at the New York Historical Society in conjunction with an Association of Art Museum Curators annual conference. He has also served as a panelist or consultant for Villa Albertine, the Joan Mitchell Center, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, PhotoNOLA, and the San Antonio Art League.

Earlier in his career, Hickey held positions at the Masur Museum of Art, California Museum of Photography, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and the Arts Council of Buffalo & Erie County. He is an active member of the Association of Art Museum Curators, having served as a trustee from 2015 to 2020. He earned his master’s in art history from the University of California Riverside and his bachelor’s in history from Canisius University.

Instagram: @_normal_ben_