Audrius Plioplys

Dr. Audrius V. Plioplys is a board-certified neurologist with special competence in child neurology in the US and Canada. He received his medical degree from the Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago. He then completed an adult neurology residency at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota followed by a pediatric neurology residency at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. He returned to Chicago where he established an Alzheimer’s disease research laboratory and ran Alzheimer’s disease clinics at the Michael Reese Hospital and Mercy Hospital and Medical Centre and was an assistant professor in the Dept. of Neurology, University of Illinois. He has spent many years working with children and young adults with severe cerebral palsy and pioneered novel programs to prevent pneumonia in children with severe CP. He was founder and past chairman of the Pediatric Long-Term Care Section of the American Medical Director’s Association.

For over thirty years he has been both a professional artist and a neurologist-neuroscientist. He has been artistically exploring the origins of thinking, of consciousness. How is it that we are aware of ourselves, of others? How is it that social interactions, culture, and civilizations arise? Basically, what is it that makes us human?

His artistic approaches have included large scale paintings, prints on paper, site-specific installations, and light sculptures with LED light systems. The underlying images are of his own previous art works. He transforms them into exotic forms, just as our memories transform visual impulses into vast neuronal web-works. Multiple layers are assembled, modified and blended. Cerebral cortical neuronal drawings, superimposed and subtracted from the surrounding color, reveal deeper layers of thoughts and memories. His own MRI brain scans and electroencephalograms are interweaved. From neuronal complexity words, thoughts, and consciousness emerge.

His most recent explorations are large-scale, pure silk scarves. These silk works of art have multiple overlapping, interweaving layers of content, meaning and visual elements. Complexity of their design matches the complexity of our own thought processes.