Inspired Leaps From the Lab to the Studio

Art and science. Or, to put it another way, creativity and systematized knowledge. However those two spheres of human endeavor are defined, they would seem to require entirely different abilities.

Yet artists have always interpreted nature and experimented with scientific observation and study. The most luminous example in the annals of art history is Leonardo da Vinci, the quintessential Renaissance man who not only painted the “Last Supper” and the “Mona Lisa,” but also applied his artistic skills and thirst for knowledge to investigations of flying machines, cloud formations and the movement of water. Leonardo’s scientific projects may have been faulty, and they may have diverted him from leaving an even greater legacy of paintings, as some critics contend, but he gave future generations of artists permission to venture into seemingly foreign territory.

And they do, as we will see with unusual clarity during the upcoming exhibition season in Southern California. Beginning today with “In the Mind’s Sky: Intersections of Art and Science,” an exhibition of contemporary art at Scripps College’s Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery in Claremont, science will have a large presence on the local art scene.

That show will be followed by “The Universe,” a separately organized, collaborative venture of eight cultural institutions in the Pasadena area. Billed as “a multicultural, multimedia exploration of the cosmos as interpreted by artists and scientists throughout the centuries,” it will run from September to May.

The ambitious project will encompass a variety of arts events and related educational programs. First up, on Sept. 23, is the inaugural concert in a series, “Music of the Spheres,” to be presented by Southwest Chamber Music at the newly renovated auditorium of the Norton Simon Museum.

Next, on Dec. 1, a spate of exhibitions in six museums and galleries will be launched with “Star Struck: One Thousand Years of the Art and Science of Astronomy,” at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. Yet another program, “The Future of the Universe,” a series of science-fiction film screenings and symposiums, will begin on Jan. 14 at Caltech.

“The Universe” grew from a smaller collaboration, “Radical Past: Contemporary Art and Music in Pasadena, 1960- 1974,” spearheaded by Jay Belloli, director of gallery programs at the Armory Center for the Arts, and presented last year. Belloli, who organized science-themed shows as director of the now-defunct Baxter Art Gallery at Caltech, also has played a leading role in “The Universe.”

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The project celebrates the importance of Pasadena as a center for the arts and sciences, but it also comes at a moment when science is an unusually popular subject at art institutions throughout the country. As the exhibition season unfolds, viewers will be confronted with imagery based on everything from medical research to journeys into space.

In the Scripps show, “In the Mind’s Sky,” many of the works may strike casual visitors as inventive patterns or abstractions, but they were inspired by biological or physical structures. Some subjects are tiny configurations of matter observed through a microscope or mapped inside the body; others are vast galaxies and constellations seen at a distance by the naked eye or brought closer by a telescope.

“My chief interest in doing this show was to look at artists who envision the imagination in terms of enormous or infinitesimal spaces,” gallery director Mary Davis MacNaughton said. A Modern art historian who has written and lectured extensively on Abstract Expressionist Adolf Gottlieb, MacNaughton said the show was sparked by her fascination with his “Burst” paintings, which suggest celestial orbs and astral bodies. “They evoke a space that could be an inner space or an outer space. There is no way of measuring it. It has no horizon or benchmarks.”

Studying the work of artists who “visualize their own imaginations in unlimited expanses of space” prompted her to question “how that way of seeing might have been shaped in part by science, by images that artists would have seen or read about,” MacNaughton said. “For a long time, we have had both a fascination with and a fear of being on the edge of new areas of scientific knowledge. It’s exhilarating and terrifying at the same time because we are never sure what it portends for the future in terms of promise and peril.

“And here we are at another frontier with the completion of the human genome project. So I thought it would be interesting to look at artists working today who think in terms of vast spaces--whether they are microscopic or macroscopic--and to see if there are visual affinities between what is hugely vast and vanishingly small.” In the artworks she selected, there are “amazing parallels,” she said. “The distances are huge at both ends of the imagination.”

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The exhibition presents new work by artists Dennis Ashbaugh, Claire Browne, Mark Francis, Nancy Macko and Carol Saindon and the team of artist Susan Rankaitis and scientist David Somers. Seen in terms of MacNaughton’s micro/macro divide, Ashbaugh, Francis and Rankaitis-Somers “map the beauty and danger of genetic coding,” while Browne, Macko and Saindon “mine the specificity and universality” of vast structures found in nature, she said. But all the participants work as creative artists, filtering their studies and observations through their imaginations.

Ashbaugh’s two large paintings read as amorphous abstractions, but they are a sort of portraiture, based on actual DNA sequences. Francis paints patterns derived from microphotographs of viruses and other organisms, which can be interpreted as carriers of some dread disease or hopeful signs of cures.

Rankaitis often incorporates scientific elements in works that merge painting and photography. The pieces at Scripps came from a collaboration with Somers, who does brain research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their installation, “Brainscapes: Codes of Indeterminacy in Science and Art”--designed as a sort of gallery-cum-waiting room--is a circular enclosure containing about 500 small images of the brain at work.

Browne draws organic masses of circles that suggest minute cellular structures but are inspired by oceans, deserts and skies. Macko casts her net even wider, through the realms of nature, technology and feminism, and over a vast expanse of time. Her iridescent diptych, “Quintessence: Study for New Constellations,” is a sky-like space swarming with symbolism and references to ancient societies, including an elongated figure climbing a ladder. The image came from a South African rock painting of a beekeeper, but in its current context the figure could be an astronaut walking in outer space.

Saindon’s work is an ambitious installation that combines images of water and space in a dark environment with a glass boat as its centerpiece. Surrounded by drawings of galaxies on black walls, the boat sits on a sparkling mound of broken glass and serves as a screen for video footage of ocean currents, shot from the side of a ship.

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The first exhibition of “The Universe” project, the Huntington’s “Star Struck” show, will explore changing conceptions of the heavens over the past millennium in about 120 rare books and manuscripts.

The remaining five “Universe” shows will open Feb. 4:

* “Contemporary Art and the Cosmos,” at the Armory Center for the Arts, will present interpretations of the universe by well-known American artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne and Rockne Krebs.

* “Creation, Constellations and the Cosmos,” at the Norton Simon Museum, will show how artists from various Asian and European cultural traditions have defined their place in the universe.

* “Russell Crotty: The Universe From My Backyard,” at Art Center College of Design, will include an installation of suspended spheres and a group of drawings of cosmic bodies, along with astronomical notations, sketches and observations.

* “Constructing the Cosmos in the Religious Arts of Asia,” at the Pacific Asia Museum, will explore perceptions of the heavens in Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Taoism.

* “Contemporary Science and Popular Culture,” at One Colorado, will display photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope in the context of boutiques and restaurants.

Meanwhile, many other institutions are either exhibiting science-themed art or making plans to do so. “Inventional,” a show portraying 17 artists as freethinking inventors, is at Angles Gallery in Santa Monica until Sept. 16. “Unnatural Science,” a current exhibition at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., is advertised as celebrating “a significant trend in contemporary art--one that not only demystifies, but also poeticizes science.”

Exit Art, a nonprofit art center in New York, will open “Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution” on Sept. 9. Billed as a landmark survey, the multimedia exhibition will feature works by 39 artists who are exploring the implications of recent genetic research.

At the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, photography curator Karen Sinsheimer is organizing her second science-related show. She had to look long and hard to find appropriate artists for the first one, “Out of Sight: Imaging/Imagining Science,” a 1998 show based on the human genome project. But she has been flooded with responses to a letter soliciting artists for a 2002-03 photography show that will explore ethical and political issues involved with genetic science.

“Artists always have their antennae out,” Sinsheimer said. “All kinds of artists are working in this area now.”

Interest in artistic and scientific correspondences also has blossomed throughout the broad field of art history. In the early 1980s, when Amy Meyers, the Huntington’s curator of American art, was doing graduate work at Yale University and writing her dissertation on the evolution of American natural history illustration, she was one of a handful of fledglings in the field. Now, thanks to a trend toward interdisciplinary research, art and science is “a hot field for young scholars,” she said.

Her experience with a long-tabled exhibition seems to prove the point. She began working on the show, tentatively titled “Nexus of Exchange: Philadelphia and the Visual Culture of Natural History, 1740-1840,” 15 years ago. As conceived, it was a relatively small project for the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Meyers put it on a back burner in 1988, when she came to the Huntington, but now the show not only has been revived, it has also mushroomed into a huge international traveling exhibition with a catalog containing essays by several authorities.

The show--which will be the first major exhibition on the history of natural science from a visual standpoint, as it emerged in North America--will open in Philadelphia in 2004 and appear at the Huntington in 2004-05, then go on an international tour. What’s more, the project has generated the nucleus of a major database that is expected to be an important resource for scholars.

No one is more amazed about all these developments than Meyers. “When I was working on my dissertation, I was quite alone,” she said. “Now this is a full-fledged scholarly pursuit.”

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* “In the Mind’s Sky: Intersections of Art and Science,” Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, 11th and Columbia streets, Claremont. Ends Oct. 15. Wednesdays through Sundays, 1-5 p.m. Free. Artists will talk about their work Sept. 2, 6 p.m., and Sept. 12, 12:30 and 2:30 p.m. (909) 607-3397.