The Seduction of Scale
A group exhibition of artists engaging nature in a micro/macro world
April 2-30, 2007
The University of Michigan Life Sciences Institute Library
Open11-5 Monday-Friday
Jan-Henrik Andersen
#18 Supersymmetric up Quark Green with No Spin
#21 Supersymmetric Anti-Green with No Spin
2004. Digital Prints
The nature of this work is to lift the veil on the optically impossible task of visually observing subatomic particles by translating their properties and behavior, known as the Standard Mode of subatomic physics, into a coherent visual three-dimensional language.
Since no one has ever seen, nor will anyone ever see anything as small as a Quark or a Neutrino, one could argue that they could look like anything, if they have "looks" at all. But their properties and behavior can offer the basis for a rational discussion of their visual presence. Unfortunately this is not enough, since one can't say with any certainty that there is only one visual solution to how one represents properties like spin, mass, charge, or color.
I proposed to represent the particles visual context where these properties represent the syntax, and then work to reflect the meaning of the properties as visual elements within an order.
Beverly Fishman
S.B.J. #1-155, 1996. Photo based collage, acrylic, and resin on wood
The choice of a cell as my subject was a reasoned one. I started with the outside of the body and kept peeling the layers like a philosopher or psychologist trying to find out who we are. It seemed to me the symbol of SELF lies within the body. The question became physical. The cell addresses the body without representing it.
I started by appropriating from various scientific and medical texts. They are then manipulated via the internal computer of the laser copier machine. Mimicking the behavior of the cell, I used the copier to replicate, divide, and mutate the image. In this way the technology likens to the endless activities of genetic processes.
The composition is taken from photographs of the clusters of cellular activity. It is important to me that the work feels ALIVE—that it is activated on the wall...ready to mutate right before our eyes.
Excerpts taken from a conversation in November 1993 with Marsha Miro
David Mann
Sonar
2003. Oil, alkyd and acrylic on canvas stretched over board
(from McKenzie Fine Art Inc.)
David Mann creates luminous abstractions that suggest primordial phenomena and moments of organic transformation rife with potential. In his paintings, concise cellular forms percolate through, and often explode from, mysterious plasmatic surroundings. Layered glazes of alternately vibrant and muted colors add to the inherent tension in these fulminating environments, enhancing the sense that the viewer is witnessing the crucial moment in an elemental cycle of genesis and decay.
He wants his work to evoke something that we know as well as something that addresses the processes, formality in abstract painting. Imagery of painting emerges from process of painting—process central to his work—the centerpiece of why he paints—painting gives him the wherewithal to play out the connections to experiment and invent with the material of paint.
Patricia Olynyk
Cenesthesia: Sight
Orb, Leading Edge, Imprint - all digital prints - all 47" x 44", and all produced in 2006.
Large-scale electron micrographs created by Olynyk portray the sense organs of a variety of specimens, including human corneas (representing sight), wild mouse taste buds and olfactory epithelia (representing taste and smell), guinea pig cochlea (representing sound) and drosophila feet (representing touch). It's an eclectic array that deliberately mixes species to emphasize that being sensate is not uniquely human. Olynyk seamlessly blends these images with enlarged details of Japanese garden spaces specifically composed and constructed by garden designers to "tickle the senses."
Freed from the confines of scale and context, sensory organs and garden details become hybrid "landscapes" where viewers can travel through tastebuds and nasal epithelial cells into a scramble of roots, reminiscent of complex vascular systems.
Brad Smith
Hox Voxels
(from psuedo transgene series, digital ultrachrome print from human embryo MRI) 2006
Frzb 01
(from psuedo transgene series, digital ultrachrome print from human embryo MRI) 2006
Brad Smith’s work portrays a confluence of biology, culture, and technology through totem-like representations of human embryos based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The human embryo has become a nexus for deliberating what it means to be an organism, human, a person, and a citizen. The embryo is variously considered in our culture as property, family member, medical cure, bearer of legal rights, experimental material, a potential, and an actualized individual. These images leverage the technology of MRI to inscribe views of human embryos that conflate the ideas of familial relationships, history, genetic manipulations, and human identity. The totem-like icons are based on MRI data that has been transformed to alter human embryo body patterns in a way that imitates the effects of Hox genes and other body pattern determining genes. The resulting images provide an unconventional view of human embryos—the subjects of intense social scrutiny. Even detached from cultural connotation, the imagery is inherently compelling.
