Natale Adgnot is a Franco-American artist who uses abstract drawing and sculpture to explore cognitive bias and logical fallacy. Best known for wall sculptures made of painted thermoplastic adhered perpendicularly onto birch panels, she challenges the viewer to consider her work from multiple perspectives.
Adgnot earned a BFA in graphic design in Texas and studied fashion in Paris. Her experience making garments for haute couture runways led her to focus on sculpture. While living in Tokyo, she began using thermoplastic (an artist-grade shrink plastic) to work three-dimensionally.
She has been featured in solo and two-person exhibitions at Established Gallery and The Society for Domestic Museology in New York, Myta Sayo Gallery in Toronto and Midori-so in Tokyo. Recent group exhibitions include “Black & White” at BWAC – a show juried by Jenée-Daria Strand of the Brooklyn Museum – where she won an award, and “Sacred Pause, Sacred Fertilizer” at the Nevelson Chapel curated by Marly Hammer and Lisa Wirth of Work in Progress. She lives and works in Brooklyn and New Paltz, New York.
I use abstract drawing and sculpture to explore human perception and the social consequences of cognitive bias and its close cousin, logical fallacy. As a first generation college graduate from Texas, my perspective on almost everything was challenged when I immigrated to France, where I lived for a decade, and during a three-year stint in Japan. At its core, my practice is a systematic dismantling of the dogma I grew up with. Drawing on bodies of knowledge such as the natural and social sciences, I contrast objective fact with subjective patterns of thinking in society. Current and past series examine stereotyping, limited perspective bias, pareidolia, naive realism and more.
My sculptures are made of painted and hand-cut thermoplastic (an artist-grade “shrinky-dink”) mounted on birch panels. Often beginning with a black and white line drawing from my ongoing sketchbook series, I reinterpret sketches as sculptures by raising the lines up from the surface. By mounting the sculptural details perpendicular to the panel, I give the resulting object a multitude of appearances depending on the observer’s viewpoint. When viewed frontally, the sculptures often appear as little more than lines on a page. They reveal their dimensionality when viewed from other angles, challenging the notion that the truth can be fully known from a fixed perspective.
My latest series of wall sculptures begins with idioms that make reference to birds, beginning with the expression “bird brain.” The Bird Brains are a glossary of logical fallacies and cognitive biases that are so pervasive they have been given colloquial status as sayings, stories, or metaphors. Continuing my ongoing exploration of faulty human perception, I match entries in the Cognitive Bias Codex (an extensive inventory of biases and fallacies) with the bird expressions that best exemplify them. From Black Swan Theory to the proverbial canary in the coal mine, I tap into this rich language to point out the stunning variety and magnitude of ways that we are all fallible.