My name is Jeanne Oss and I have been creating this blog as well as a video on the current art exhibit, Shedding Light: Art Explore science!

Check out the video here or click on any of these screen shows below to navigate to the youtube page!

Click the image to navigate to the page to listen to the segment!

Phyllis Goldin is a composer, singer/songwriter, visual artist, writer and physician. She lives in River Falls, WI.

Anyone doubting the interconnectedness of art and science will have an eye opening experience at”Shedding Light”, an exhibition on display at the Phipps Galleries until June 6, 2010. The show features the work of six seasoned artists, Susan Armington, Christine Baeumler, Heidi Haferman, David Lefkowitz, Jantje Visscher and Krista Kelley Walsh.

The work of these artists, though strikingly different from one another, seems to me to cluster in two ways. Some of the work serves as commentary on science or science as a springboard for inspiration or creative stimulation. And some seems to express scientific principles, given unique life through artistic process.

Beginning in the Atrium Gallery to the right as one enters the building is the beginning of a piece by Susan Armington called the Life of Petroleum. Many small oil paintings of primordial sea creatures and two larger pieces hung on top of a turqoise and gold shawl introduce the journey of oil that continues on a ribbon of black tape through the lobby and into the galleries at the other end of the building. At intervals small paintings and explanations illuminate the perilous history of human exploitation of petroleum resources that required eons of development. In this way science is given an expanded context through educational, artistic process.

Entering the northern gallery on the main floor two walls hold large, illuminated three dimensional installations by Jantje Visscher. As artist, lost in science, these pieces are constructed of clear plastic panels scored in ways that bend light into fascinating shadows on the wall behind. One piece is hung vertically under white light creating intended effects of leaves, feathers, fish ribs, waves and ripples. The other piece features curved panels exposed to blue and white LED light producing images, sensuous and reminiscent of musical staffs, in white, blue, and it’s complementary opposite, yellow. To summarize the artist herself these pieces “focus” light into a “cosmic fabric”.  Distant as I am from studies of refraction, comingling of art and science is beautifully apparent in this work.

Upstairs the work of Heidi Haferman comments on her concerns about the destructive effect of the pharmaceutical industry on humans and the environment. The artist wonders how small pills we see advertized on TV can have such powerful effects. One of her installations is a curled up figure under a sheet with big cloth pills and capsules sprinkled on top. This overdose scene is aptly created in white. In contrast the other fabric piece is a colorful collection of five bins overflowing with medicines. Hanging at assorted heights above the bins are oversized pills and capsules giving the larger than life effect that challenges science run amuck.

I didn’t have a chance to speak with David Lefkowitz about his striking collection of bright, precisely painted tangled vines and ropes in oil on wood panels. In his work I see the fragile connection between Nature and the ropes of bondage created by humanity (and science) to harness Nature. In his written summary he says “science is the dominant paradigm of how the world works while art makes the conundrum visible…art complicates the straightforward separation between observer and observed.” Science is the launching pad for this artistic work that broadens our perceptions of reality.
Christine Baeumler created a body of work after journeying to the Galapagos Islands and encountering species that amazed her and got her to wonder about the connection between observer and observed. Scientists also grapple with this question. One part of this exhibit is a group of black and white photographs of creatures she saw either live or preserved in museums. Since her journey took her to Charles Darwin’s scientific home, she used the platinum photographic process of his era. Also, in keeping with the objects in Darwin’s laboratory, she installed a long rectangular table with five large, glass bell jars set into it. Peering into the jars the observer sees exotic birds, amphibians and animals in motion accompanied by a soundtrack obtained on location and combined with an original musical composition. A magical quality in this admixture of life, science and art, gives credence to their abiding connection.

Set in the small gallery with a wall of windows facing the St. Croix river are jars and vases, partially filled with water, created by Krista Kelley Walsh. This installation reveals changing patterns of light and shadows throughout the day as the sun is refracted by the variously shaped glass. Here we experience art merging seamlessly with science. With a little imagination one may see spiritual images on the walls or small panoramas of outdoor scenes in the vases. The artist indicates her fascination with “things unseen…moments of wonder” and harkens back to Einstein”s words, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is mysterious: it is the source of all true art and science”.

Artists and scientists are related at their core, sharing roots in unbridled curiosity. Come, take the time to immerse yourself in these offerings and you are likely to tap your sense of wonder, the artist and scientist in you and each of us.

After Krista Kelley Walsh’s installation: Things Unseen 2010

A valley’s sedate landscape

is turned upside down

when you see it through

a sunlit, water-filled

round glass vase. Mysterious,

how treetops become

roots, nourished

by underwater clouds. So, I think

if we each turn our own landscape

topsy-turvy

something magical will happen

like after a desert rain

when a tadpole, nurtured

by water as scant as a cirrus strand,

morphs into a spade-foot toad

in less than two weeks.

Alberta Lee Orcutt , May 2010

]]> http://phippsart.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/poetry-written-after-the-krista-kelley-walsh-installation/feed/ 1 osspo777 http://phippsart.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/seminar-artists-explore-the-role-of-art-and-sustainability-with-christine-baeumler-by-anastasia-visual-arts-director-the-phipps/ http://phippsart.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/seminar-artists-explore-the-role-of-art-and-sustainability-with-christine-baeumler-by-anastasia-visual-arts-director-the-phipps/#comments Tue, 11 May 2010 23:58:59 +0000 osspo777 http://phippsart.wordpress.com/?p=199 Continue reading →]]> By Anastasia Shartin, Director of The Phipps

On Monday, May 10, Christine Baeumler led a seminar for 27 area artists who are participating in a series of gatherings to explore the role of art and sustainability.  This series, organized by The Phipps Center for the Arts, is designed to build community relationships, generate dialogue, stimulate understanding, and spark action.  This is the second year of this project and both new and returning artists have enrolled.  These artists are from throughout the St. Croix Valley – from River Falls to St. Croix Falls, and from Spring Valley to Bayport – as well as from White Bear Lake and the Twin Cities.

Christine began the session by showing artists’ projects that inspired her environmental community art projects for which she is as well known as she is for her studio work.  Two projects she shared with the group were Mel Chin’s Revival Field project (http://www.satorimedia.com/fmraWeb/chin.htm) and Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape (http://www.greenmuseum.org/content/artist_index/artist_id-129.html).  Chin’s Revival Fields have been created in various locations from 1990 to the present.  For these, he designs gardens using plants that remove heavy metals from contaminated soil.  Sonfist created Time Landscape as a living monument to the forest that once blanketed Manhattan Island.  He proposed the project in 1965.  After extensive research on New York’s botany, geology, and history, Sonfist and local community members used a palette of native trees, shrubs, wild grasses, flowers, plants, rocks, and earth to plant the 25′ x 40′ plot in New York City’s Greenwich Village in 1978.  The result is a slowly developing forest that represents the Manhattan landscape inhabited by Native Americans and encountered by Dutch settlers in the early 17th century.

Christine then showed the group images from her own environmental art projects including a wildflower garden with Como Park Conservatory Youth Program and Friends of Swede Hollow, St. Paul (2000 – 02); and a much longer term project, the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary at Lower Phalen Creek (http://www.mepartnership.org/sites/LOWERPHALENCREEK/sub_page6.asp), for which she worked on a steering committee to create a new city park along the Mississippi River in St. Paul (1996 – 2006).

Important to each of the seminar meetings is an opportunity for interaction among participants.  For this session, Christine introduced the group to a series of questions developed by No Limits for Women Artists, a group she was involved with for a number of years.  Participants paired up and then took turns of five minutes each to be the listener and then the responder.  The questions were, “What is your greatest vision as an artist?” “What are your next steps to realizing that vision?” “What kind of support do you need?”  And, “How are you going to make sure you keep going?”  While for this session, each responder was given five minutes, Christine said that her group built to the point where they each took an hour to respond.  The group at The Phipps found even five minutes to be challenging, particularly for the listener who was to listen only and not verbally interject or question what was being said.

After this, the participants took time to walk through the exhibit, “Shedding Light,” and then met in Gallery Three with Christine’s work, a video installation titled Darwin’s Table and a salon style hanging of 30 platinum prints, South American Miscellanea.  She spoke briefly about the work and then opened the discussion for responses and questions.

Here are some pictures taken at the opening by Helios Photography:

What aspect(s) of science does your work focus on?

I’m interested in the notion of the scientist as a careful observer of the natural world. I’m also fascinated by the idea of non-human sentience.  This relates to the origins our mental and physical traits and capacities as well as emphasizing our connection to other species. Darwin’s statement that “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind,” seems like such a radical notion. I still think that contemporary, industrialized humans are grappling with the idea that we are still part of a continuum rather than exist apart from our environment and the other organisms.

What inspired you to choose this focus?

An ongoing interest in environmental issues –particularly about the decline of animal species resulting in extinction, has led to an interest in the Charles Darwin’s ideas about how animals adapt or are unable to adapt to their environments. In a time when the environment is undergoing rapid and unpredictable change due to human activities, I am interested in species and places that are particularly vulnerable, such as the Galapagos and the Amazon Rain Forest.

What does your art offer the viewer in terms of a way of seeing or experiencing that might be different from our ordinary approaches to science?

My intention is to present the viewer with “specimens of experience,” in the form of video, bio-acoustic sound and photographs. The viewer draws her or his own interpretations from the work, rather having me provide conclusions in the form of digested data.

Did you have any discoveries while making your work?

Having been in close proximity while photographing or filming animals– birds, whales and sea lions in particular, I have had the opportunity to be observed as well as the observer. This experience of reciprocity was very profound and shifted my position in relationship to my subject.

Any special challenges?

The main challenge is translating what for me was a deep experience of an encounter with other species and habitats into art. How can I possibly communicate being eye to eye with a whale or seeing fireflies in the night sky of the Amazon. Art sometimes seems to fall quite short in capturing what all the senses of a direct experience can transmit to our brains. I also want art to have a more significant impact on the way we approach our lives—but recognize both its power and limitations to get us to consider the impact of our decisions and actions.

The Edge of Reason:

Shedding Light at The Phipps

By Christina Schmid

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”

– Albert Einstein[i]

Trust Albert Einstein to articulate what reconciles two seemingly opposite ways of making sense of the world: science with its prerequisite distance to ensure analytical dissection of phenomena, its insistence on clear parameters, and its investment in objective, repeatable observations—and art with its open-ended and idiosyncratic inquiries, whose tangible and intangible shapes time and again refute rationality. Yet despite their differences, both disciplines share a deep curiosity, a commitment to exploring the mysterious, and an appetite for wonder.

The ambiguity of wonder, with its rare blend of speculation and awe, figures prominently in “Shedding Light: Art Explores Science.” Curated by Susan Armington, the show brings together six artists whose work engages with science: its discourse, methods, appeal, ubiquity, and history. This combination, which Armington describes as a kind of experiment in and of itself, allows for a multifaceted conversation about the interstices between science and art.

Why facilitate this conversation between art and science? Is it not true that most artistic production relies on science—think of photography’s optical, chemical, and digital adventures or painting’s sophisticated mixing of pigments, oils, and thinners–and that, on the other hand, science can explain art’s strange seductions? Yes and no. Art’s effects can never be reduced to the medium alone, regardless of how sophisticated the execution may be. And, despite neuroscience’s elaborate studies in cognition and perception, art continues to exceed what science can account for.

“The aesthetic response,” writes curator and critic Michael Brenson, “is miraculous. Such an astonishing amount of psychological, social, and historical information can be interwoven into a single connective charge that a lifetime of thinking cannot disentangle the threads.”[ii] But while Brenson cherishes this bewilderment, rationalists such as Rene Descartes might find it deeply troubling: “What we commonly call being astonished is an excess of wonder which can never be otherwise than bad,” he argued.[iii] Thus, despite their shared interest in the mysterious, art and science pursue different, though not mutually exclusive, goals.

While science aims at knowledge production that is verifiable and can be expressed in qualitative and quantitative analyses, the knowledge art promises is subjective, private, even intimate at times, and forces language to the point of fracture.[iv] Art always invites an embodied perception, while science seeks to abstract and generalize. Both rely on observation. Ultimately, both aim to produce a kind of knowledge that, for very different reasons, remains incomplete: while the embodied knowledge of the aesthetic encounter resists and exceeds verbal expression, scientific knowledge is useful only to the extent that it can be communicated, expressed, mapped, and purposefully harnessed. Additionally, scientific knowledge, while based on the most reliable methods and techniques currently available, is hypothetical, open to revision and refutation.

“Shedding Light” navigates the spaces between art and science by alerting us to such similarities and profound differences. Art, like science, can appear inaccessible to people unfamiliar with the jargon of either discipline. Susan Armington’s The Life Story of Petroleum addresses viewers in what she calls her storytelling voice, as if to assure us that yes, we, too, can join this conversation and explore science through art.

Inspired by scientific life cycle analysis, Armington’s time line of petroleum begins like a fairy tale: “Once upon a time, 400 million years ago.” The artist invites us to marvel along with her, as she unravels the infinitesimally slow transformation of microscopic plankton drifters and wanderers into crude oil and, eventually, petroleum. The fantastic oceanic world of old becomes increasingly ordinary, familiar, even mundane, as the time line slowly transports us into the present.

But what Armington suggests is that underneath the quotidian banality of pumping gas there is a story that is anything but ordinary: each drop of oil, each plume of exhaust, bears a trace of the tiny ancient creatures, transformed by unimaginable forces and immense time spans. In other words, The Life Story of Petroleum asks us to wonder unabashedly, to prize the ordinary for its very strangeness, and, via the tiny specks of mirrored tile, to see our own part in the unfolding of this particular story.

Krista Kelly Walsh’s installation Things Unseen overlooks the St. Croix River valley and, like Armington’s time line, asks us to treasure the marvelous in the ordinary.  With its deceptively simple array of water-filled glass vases on the windowsills, Things Unseen entices us to pause, sit, look closely, and realize just how much there is to look at: the stunning daytime view of the river valley, the play of broken and refracted light and shadow, and, once we peek through the vases as lenses, a world warped by the concavities and convexities of the glass surfaces.

Rather than tell us a story, Things Unseen invites us to make up our own narratives of discovery, as each subtle shift in position vis-à-vis the vases leads to new surprises and literally makes visible things previously unseen. We may choose to stay in the realm of optics and reflect on why we see what we see, how lenses and light angles combine to produce these effects. On the other hand, we may venture into metaphor and ponder the importance of adopting different points of view and how doing that may change our very view of the world. Or, we may simply contemplate Walsh’s mindful arrangement of these deceptively simple materials—nothing but glass, sunlight, water—and, perhaps, play a little by ducking this way and that: after all,  “if people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”[v]

Jantje Visscher shares Walsh’s commitment to working with ordinary materials to achieve extraordinary effects: clear plastic strips, fishing line, steel pins, and light form the basis of her sculptures, Twisting Fate and Breaking Light. Visscher’s vocabulary of light invites us to wonder, to speculate and marvel, at the uncanny affinities these inanimate luminescent shapes share with delicate dorsal fins or the graceful arc of birds’ wings. Her work simultaneously abstracts and condenses naturally occurring patterns. Without doubt, the language of mathematics could unravel the formulas and algorithms of these intangible webs, but just as surely that act of translation into scientific discourse would miss the point. Visscher’s work activates the science of light in order to create possibilities for perceptual experiences that exceed what scientific analysis can explain. Simply put, the visceral encounter with her work does not stop at the edge of reason. Then, we gently come undone, are radically de-centered, if only for a moment, by the experience of the beautiful.[vi]

Such experiences also play a prominent part in Christine Baeumler’s Darwin’s Table: on a massive wooden table, five bell jars house short video loops of animals the artist filmed while traveling in the Galapagos Island Nature Conservancy, following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin. Positioned centrally amongst these specimens of experience is a human eye morphing into a fish eye, alluding to Ernst Haeckel’s famous insight that ontogenesis resembles phylogenesis: each human embryo repeats the steps of our evolutionary development as a species. But the luminescent videos also speak to the development of scientific and creative conservation efforts. We no longer have to kill, stuff, and collect, as was the custom in Darwin’s day. Technology, that is, applied science, allows us to document and study the natural world in much less invasive ways today.

South American Miscellanea, a selection of Baeumler’s photographs turns back the technological clock: produced as platinum prints, a process used in Darwin’s day, and hung in the salon style of 18^th-century Wunderkammern, the photographs juxtapose images of stuffed birds from the dioramas of Lima’s Natural History Museum with birds the artist encountered in the South American rain forest. By blurring the lines between the wild creatures and the taxidermied remains of their relatives, Baeumler’s work implicitly asks us to consider how we would rather encounter these avian creatures: as neatly arranged, labeled, and more or less diligently preserved specimens in a museum or as noisy, unruly, amazing flocks in the wild. But as Baeumler’s photographs insinuate, differentiating between the natural and the preserved has become increasingly difficult. The very idea of the natural as somehow pure and untainted by any human presence or scientific intervention seems hopelessly outdated, as we re-purpose nature and conserve shrinking habitats for scientific study and eco-tourism.

David Lefkowitz’s paintings tell a similar story of the irrevocable entanglement of nature and technology. The foregrounds of his Tangle paintings are dominated by complicated knots of wires and plant material, suggesting, at times, a parasitical, at other times a quasi-symbiotic relationship. In  Tangle #29, the intertwined strands of organic and inorganic material are framed by a lavishly colored sky and eerily beautiful in their portentous embrace. Their intertwining becomes a new sublime in these paintings, terrifying and amazing, the source of fascination and fear. Yet despite the mythical splendor of Lefkowitz’s skies, technology’s ubiquity has also made it ordinary, weed-like, and cropping up in unlikely places, as in Tangle #32, where a precocious Dandelion defeats the tarmac. But this rampant proliferation also raises the specter of an out-of-control, invasive, metastasizing growth, an anxiety that the gathering storm in the background of Tangle #27 alludes to.

Aside from the ominous cloudscapes, the backgrounds of these Tangle paintings tell yet another story. Their blurry snapshot quality is reminiscent of amateur digital photography and alludes to a certain haste and shallowness in the everyday perception of our surroundings. The paintings suggest an antidote to this incessantly mobile, fast-paced mode of perception and aim to seduce us into looking a little more closely, lingering a little longer.

Heidi Hafermann’s untitled installation investigates a different kind of seduction: that of colorful pills that promise to make us happy, attractive, and smart. In this pharmacological universe, everything is a possible symptom, lucratively treatable. But Hafermann’s blotchy and disproportionately large pills look singularly unappealing. Imprinted with the cautious language of medical didactics, these hand-sewn pills effectively raise doubts about the trust we place in a system that sets the standard, determines the norm, and transforms the complexities of human experience into clear-cut diagnoses. Without explicitly discounting their medical usefulness or profitability, Hafermann’s installation emanates a certain unease.

The ubiquity of pharmacologically engineered experience in our lives should give us pause; the way these drugs homogenize experience and pale our emotional states should make us think, the monochromatic bedroom suggests. What, in other words, do we stand to lose by muffling and cushioning our exposure to the real by pills that double as tiny pillows? Hafermann’s work aims at making strange the colorful ordinariness of these pills.

Thus, like all of the artists in “Shedding Light”, Hafermann exhorts us to pay attention, to look closely, and to consider carefully the eponymous light that scientific inquiry continues to shed on the world. After all, as David Lefkowitz pointed out in conversation, “shedding light” can also mean abandoning light in favor of obfuscation and darkness.

This ambiguity pervades “Shedding Light.” Poised between celebration and wariness of our everyday entanglements with applied science, the artists in “Shedding Light” show us the marvelous in the ordinary. By using the visual and conceptual vocabulary of science in entirely impractical ways, they create opportunities for wonder. But equally important, they show that, taken together, science and art may deepen our understanding and appreciation of the world. If science takes us to the edge of the known and makes visible things otherwise unseen, art’s explorations of science invite us to pause at this edge—to linger, play, and reflect, lest we tumble over some proverbial precipice.

Christina Schmid is an Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at the
College of Visual Arts in St. Paul and one of three managing editors at
Quodlibetica.com, an online magazine dedicated to arts, writing, and
criticism.

[ii] Michael Brenson, “Art Criticism and the Aesthetic Response.” Act of Engagement. New York, Toronto, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004. 66.

[iii] Rene Descartes, quoted in Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. 89.

[iv] Dave Hickey, “Air Guitar.” Air Guitar. Los Angeles: Art Issues press, 1997. 167.

[v] Ludwig Wittgenstein. Culture and Value. Trans. Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. 50.

[vi] Elaine Scarry. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1999. 111.

1. What aspect(s) of science does your work focus on? What inspired you to choose this focus?

I think this work does not necessarily relate to a particular aspect of science. The work uses the language of nature and repetitive principles of nature, but it does not represent any image scientifically or “realistically” or illustrate anything.  It uses a force of nature, light, as a drawing medium.  With that medium the work presents forms and shapes that are often repeated in nature, in different phenomenon, in different types of environments, and their scale can be anything from microscopic to cosmic.  Any specific interpretation is up to the viewer.  Further, many of the images have optical qualities that make them shift continuously to our eyes and that is yet another sense in which an image cannot be pinned down.

In the universe we live in there is not necessarily a “right” answer, ambiguous things change constantly, and we continuously find new and strangely beautiful images in our microscopes and telescopes.  I want my art to communicate these thoughts.

2. What does your art offer the viewer in terms of a way of seeing or experiencing that might be different from our ordinary approaches to science?

These “Drawings In Light” began with several accidents.  First, I had some of this clear plastic in my studio for another reason (I was making backing for paintings).  Being in my studio made it fair game as an art material, and I started making painted sculptures out of it.  Then in order to light the sculpture I changed some of my lights from wall-washing lights made for paintings to lights that cast shadows for sculpture.  Then I just neglected to paint one of the sculptures, put it on the wall anyway, and there on the wall I saw the repeated focused reflections you see in the “Drawings In Light.”  So it started with several accidents, all of which were necessary – and in that order – to make what you see on the wall.  Nearly every piece I made has had a few more accidental discoveries, but those were the essential ones.