Monday night, Eve Andre Laramee was introduced by Professor Linda Weintraub of the Emerging Arts Program as a “highly respected and innovative” artist that has a “remarkable creative process,” which was the series focus. So when Ms. Laramee, executive director of the Center for Parascientific Research, told us her aim was to “integrate enlightenment-based dichotomies, art and science, and dissolve their comfortable autonomies,” the Obies in the room didn’t bat an eye.

Laramee, poised and articulate, spoke about the Center’s process, talking in particular about Yves Fissiault (pronounced “Eve Fisio”), a scientist who worked on missiles in the 1970s, but was also secretly an artist. Fired for being a security risk, he and his wife, Mia L’Amar, a film actress who was blacklisted for inserting real physics facts into her sci-fi movie lines, took off to Mexico where they met up with novelist Thomas Pynchon. As the “executrix” of Fissiault’s estate, Laramee gained access to his artwork, which she presented in a slideshow.

Sound like a great story? It is one. After almost a full half hour of description, both of the Center for Parascientific Research and the life’s work of Fissiault, Laramee revealed herself as a pawn in her own game. She, in fact, was the creator of the artwork we’d seen in the slides through taking on the alter ego of a scientist-artist, based on her father. “I tried to be him as an art project,” Laramee said.

Certainly not something usually assigned in an art class. But “Secret History,” Ms. Laramee’s piece, is designed to subvert conceptions of art. “This piece questioned not only the authority of art museums and institutions but the authority of the artist,” Laramee said.
Both aspects of the work, the suspension of her own identity and giving “performances” in the curator character, were appreciated by the Oberlin audience, many of whom caught on early. Junior Kim Menig, one of the students attending the lecture, was originally skeptical. “I was like, she’s from the Center for Parascientific Research?” Menig said. But once the depth of the project was revealed, Menig appreciated the work. “I really like the idea of art as more than a means of self-expression.”
For Laramee, “Secret History” was somewhat of a personal odyssey. She describes her work as process-oriented and said that during the week she became Yves Fissiault, the alter ego based on her father, she changed many things about the way she worked. “The repetition of the [Yves Fissiault/Mia L’Amar] myth became a studio ritual,’ Laramee said, “a realization of purpose through an exercise in form.” As the project continued, Internet research helped her discover a half-sister who she’d never met, turning, as she put it, “fact and fiction into a conceptual matrix.”

Science is also an interest of Laramee’s, as her other projects also intersect with science. She has done a large textile piece about the history of digital technology that was exhibited at MIT and another one in which she made a “machine” to communicate with Kepler’s ghost.

“Secret History” was on display in Islip, New York. There, Ms. Laramee provided walk-through tours, posing as the same curator we heard lecture but without ever breaking character. Did people get it?

“Those people that really took the time to walk through and look at all the pieces. I think there was an understanding by the end,” she said. Although the exhibit was publicly reviewed as work by unknown artist Fissiault, Laramee says that she never meant to create a hoax but rather change the way she approached her creative process. For a few moments, there was a palpable suspicion that this might not just be a work about testing authority but about audience gullibility.

But that is, in a sense, one of the questions that “Secret History” asks. It also is an overlapping not just of science and art, but also of different kinds of art: visual, literary and performative. The boundaries get blurred in every direction, and that’s Laramee’s intent.