The Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics is a pioneering team of researchers and scientists who explore the neural and biological basis of aesthetic experiences. Questions they try to answer include: What is the relationship between beauty and morality? What effect does architecture have on cognition? And more broadly, how do people interact with art?
Since art is often at the heart of their research, the team added an artist-in-residence position about five years ago. Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, neurologist and center director, said people like Schaechter bring a unique and fresh perspective to their work.
“One of the challenges always is, you don’t know what you don’t know,” he said. “Having people like an art historian or an artist who … have a completely different disciplinary background and an angle into these questions is tremendously helpful and useful for us to expand our thinking.”
Finding the right person who could fill the position and fit in with the team is important, Chatterjee said.
“Someone who has a very clear sense of what they want to do is less interesting to me,” he said. “I don’t want someone who’s going to illustrate brains, that’s boring. I don’t want someone who is going to represent our data in a fancy way.”
Then Schaechter entered the picture in 2022.
Some of her work is reminiscent of medieval illustration, but lit up from the back. Several pieces take on a more gothic tone with darker colors and maudlin and melancholic faces. Others are a series of macabre scenes featuring children and animals, often offset by a brightness of flowers, birds and other organisms.
