Try entering the O’Callahan Science Library and you may be surprised to find a wall partition and hazard tape where the entrance to the Swords Atrium used to be.
But the Sci Li — as it is affectionately known to students — is not closed. Following the opening of the new Park B. and Linda Smith Labs, Haberlin Hall is undergoing a top-to-bottom renovation, which makes the library a bit difficult to find.
Students won’t have to look at dreary plywood construction for the next year, though.
After being contacted by science librarian Barbara Merolli, Cristi Rinklin, associate professor of visual art, asked her Art of Color class to develop some bright, complex, science-inspired artwork. The project was a perfect fit for Rinklin’s course, since it allowed her students to explore a subject that is very popular with modern artists.
The result is an eye-popping floor-to-ceiling installation of artwork, titled Hidden Worlds: Color in Art and Science, entirely done by students. The installation will be on display until the Haberlin construction is completed at the end of 2009.
Students in the class, which included some visual arts majors and minors, were Christie Cushnie ’10, Johanna Gavin ’11, Wilza Jean ’11, Carla Katigbak ’11, Lisa Kelly ’09, Thomas LeComte ’09, Alicia Lopez ’09, Erin Singleton ’09, Kledia Spiro ’10, Alex Vander Baan ’09, and Niko Williams ’10.
“Currently, a lot of contemporary art interfaces with science,” said Rinklin, explaining the interdisciplinary connection. “Creating a dialogue between art and other parts of campus is important to the entire art department.” Her students enjoyed looking at science through the lens of art, and using real technology to obtain “good juicy inspiration.”
With the help of Mary Lee Ledbetter, professor of biology, and Robert Bellin, associate professor of biology, the class of 11 students spent a day last semester in a science lab garnering ideas. They viewed slides under compound microscopes, a scanning electron microscope, and the recently acquired confocal microscope, which identifies particular parts of cells using laser technology.
Some students preferred the illuminated tissue slides on the compound microscopes, alternately looking through the lens and sketching. Others were drawn to the printed images from the confocal microscope: fluorescent swirls on a black backdrop. To a scientist’s eye, the bubbles and curls of color represent particular molecules; for the artists, the abstract shapes became inspiration.
Ledbetter loved watching the artists at work in the lab. “I was amazed at how immediately they got their ideas,” she said, while admiring the finished products at the gallery opening on Jan. 21. “They weren’t copying the slides; they were inspired by the slides. They really got into it. They also liked the idea of using an image as scientific data.”
Katigbak, an Italian and visual arts history double major with a visual arts studio minor, explained her method of altering the content of her slide, a piece of a fly’s eyeball, into a work of art. “We started sketching there, and later made a small painting. We scanned those and put them in Photoshop, then layered and copied the images. It was hard work — about four hours painting and three hours editing — but it was worth it.”
All of the students went through the same process, turning their lab sketches into vibrant 8 ½ by 11-inch paintings back in the art studio, and manipulating them into digital images on the computer. The resulting works are uniform in dimension — 2 feet wide and almost 10 feet tall, spanning floor-to-ceiling — but vary greatly in content and color scheme.
Katigbak’s image bursts with color and organic shapes, subtly reminiscent of textbook diagrams of tissue cells, but wonderfully distorted. Half of the piece has an interesting feather-like quality, with colorful wisps sprouting from the curves and spheres. “In my piece I wanted texture, and I love psychedelic colors,” she said.
Similarly, LeComte, a visual arts studio major, integrated bright pastels into his aquatic-themed painting. He elected to use more literal images, though, creating a fantastical undersea scene with strangely altered jellyfish and coral-like creatures.
“My piece is a marine squid piece,” he said. “I watch a lot of Animal Planet and just went crazy.”
His manipulations of the original image are evident by the complex layering of spheres and tentacles. In LeComte’s opinion, “This exercise proves everyone’s an artist!”
In some pieces, the artwork engaged other aspects of study in a dialogue. Erin Singleton ’09 felt inspired by images of neuron and synapses, which she has spent years studying in terms of biological function.
“I’m a psychology major, and it was great, because I was able to use that material in a completely new way,” she said. “I used spindly shapes and prismatic colors.”
By Lexie Winslow ’09
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