Image of “Entanglement” by Julia Oldham, courtesy of G Fine Art

“My name is Julia Oldham and I love to anthropomorphize insects,” the artist explains in an interview for New York’s alternative art space Art in General. Oldham’ts older video projects, Churr-Churr and The Timber, are a compilation of successfully jarring performances in which she uses her body to imitate the awkwardly repetitive rituals of insect behavior. The results from these projects aren’t meant to be illustrative in an entomological sense. Rather, they are meant to decontextualize our antagonistic conceptions of insects, and potentially lead us to temporarily re-imagine our relationship with nature. Similarly, Oldham’s current project, Fundamental Constants, on display at G Fine Art through October 16, is meant to decontextualize our relationship with science and scientific discovery, although her approach is a marked departure from the body-centric mechanics of her previous projects.

Fundamental Constants finds the artist recreating three scientific experiments and theories — the Fizeau apparatus, the Cavendish experiment and quantum entanglement theory — as performances using common materials and a DIY aesthetic. Oldham interchangeably takes on the role of observer, subject, and test instrument in videos that are meant to be deliberately absurd, but which are at times confounding in their lack of context.