These photos bear an eerie, graceful, painful resemblance to the country where I grew up.
The year I finished high school, my parents left “town” (7,000 people) for twenty acres outside a decaying farming village of 50 people (more or less). Over time, the village lost its school, its church, its general store, and its gas station; the only amenities left behind in 1994 were a post office and a cafe.
I always thought it was a terribly sad place. It lies on a high plateau, with little to break the weather. In the winter, snowdrifts render the whole country featureless and disorienting. In the summer, wind ripples incessantly across the empty fields, pries wide the gaping sideboards of empty houses, erodes gentle mounds that one only recognizes as former farmsteads because they’re covered with tenacious yellow roses.
Supposedly, an entire neighboring community has completely vanished in this way, plowed under wheat and shrouded in roses. In the early morning, coming home from the night shift at the vegetable packing plant, I used to take random dirt roads through the farmland, looking for this ghost town. I never found it, but then I’m not sure I would have known if I did.
Livet et al. 2007. Transgenic strategies for combinatorial expression of fluorescent proteins in the nervous system. Nature.
No, that’s not a winter scarf knitted from rainbow yarn. It’s a glowing mouse brain - the Brainbow paper is finally out! I was going to write this up, but the heck with it - just go read what Shelly wrote at Retrospectacle. She’s succinctly covered all the important points, with a nice science/art tie-in to boot.
Have you ever encountered an artist whose work seems so familiar, you feel as if he or she has ensnared your memories? I had that feeling when I first saw Robert Parkeharrison’s The Architect’s Brother. His photographs are like feverish childhood dreams: a Brobdingnagian world in which impossible tasks out of a fairy tale retold by Roald Dahl are documented by the director of La Voyage Dans La Lune. At least these images resemble my childhood dreams, which typically involved gigantic waterclocks, desolate post-nuclear landscapes, and garbled concatenations of literary references. Mr. Parkeharrison has been rummaging around in my brain! So of course I have to buy this book, and you should too. The Architect’s Brothertraveling collection will next visit the Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science in Tallahassee, Florida.
I wish there was also a compilation of the newer work he has completed with his wife, Shana Parkeharrison. Some of this work is visible at the Jack Shainman Gallery. Unlike the Architect’s Brother collection, in which the conflict between madman and injured nature is blunted almost into whimsy, the newer works are starkly ominous. In “Stolen Summer,” butterflies are nailed to a wall, their pigments running down like blood. A bandaged tree bleeds into a glass tumbler. An old man sits oblivious as vines creep under a door towards his legs. These images are also the stuff of fairy tale, but a harsh, fluorescent-lit, urban iteration - less Brothers Grimm, more China Mieville.
One of my favorite blogs, Curious Expeditions, has written what may be the definitive blog post for library lovers. I’ve only been to four of the libraries on the list, but I was at one of them just today, so it was a timely post.
There are definitely more beautiful libraries in Europe, but I’m excited to pop over to Georgetown and see the deliciously steampunky Captain Nemo Riggs Library. Can’t wait for a giant squid to swim past those portholes.
a girl
whose hair is yellower than
torchlight should wear no
headdress but fresh flowers
-Sappho (translated by Mary Barnard)
I’ll be traveling for the next three weeks, so posts will be sparse. But I’ll be on the lookout for things to share - like this counterpoint of art and nature, from a visit to Lakewold Gardens, about an hour south of Seattle.
This quiz asks you to differentiate between real photographs and computer-generated images. Regrettably, I only got 7 of 10 right - CGI is beginning to scare me!
“but low-lying Ithaca is farthest out to sea,
towards the sunset, and the others are apart, towards the dawn and sun.”
-Homer, Odyssey
“Ithaca”
Constantine Cavafy
When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon — do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.
Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.
Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.
Last weekend I discovered Seattle’s Gas Works Park. By accident. And ended up on a tour through the derelict gasworks - led by the park’s designer, Richard Haag. The structures are fenced off, so I got the impression this was an unusual privilege. Fortunately my camera’s battery wasn’t completely exhausted, though I was torn between taking photos and listening to Haag recount his efforts several decades ago to convince the city that the industrial site could be bioremediated. Among his persuasive arguments: growing a nice crop of tomatoes in what was thought to be dead soil.
A former refinery that converted oil and coal to gas, the plant became obsolete in the 1950s, leaving the ground beneath saturated with tar and aromatic hydrocarbons. It was one of the first toxic industrial sites to be successfully reclaimed for public use through bioremediation (although it is still monitored, and intermittent cleanup efforts continue).
My first reaction was WTF?!? How could I know nothing about this extraordinary place? I am so impressed with the city of Seattle (and Haag) for maintaining the towers in their rusty steampunk glory, instead of leveling them, as the original plans for the site demanded. Out of 1400 such gasification plants once operating across the US, this is the largest remnant left standing.
From the park outside, the gasworks now resemble a gigantic modern sculpture with a fashionably distressed patina. The unreal blue-green of the Seattle grass contrasts so strongly with the red rust that it stings the eyes. But in among the towers, the scene is ghostly. Blackberries twine lushly through the iron girders, obviously undaunted by any lingering contamination in the soil. Small piles of bleached bones, perhaps from rodents or birds, litter the ruins. Only a few dangling loops of slender T1 cable, probably from a security system, betray that the Internet Age has supplanted the Industrial.
Although the refinery is barely over 100 years old (and despite its rivets and cogs, not properly “steampunk” at all), rain and benign neglect have left it seemingly ancient, like a half-exposed fossil. I hope these images capture its aura of timeless decay.
“Most people think of science as abstract and numerical. In fact, science is a surprisingly visual endeavor: both data and theory are often driven by pictures and images. Felice Frankel’s work conveys the tremendous beauty and excitement of science–letting the layperson share in the wonder of studying the natural world.”
-Eric S. Lander
Continuing yesterday’s theme, but from the art world’s side, gallery owner Edward Winkleman responds on his blog to a NYT profile of Felice Frankel. Winkleman pulls the same things from the piece that got me ruffled when I read it last night.
According to the NYT, Frankel started a stint at MIT as “artist-in-residence,” but ended there as a “research scientist.” No explanation is given for this transition, but it might have something to do with the two reasons Frankel herself disavows “artist” status. She says:
1) her work doesn’t sell, and
2) her work is not about her own ego.
Therefore, she’s not an artist. Double ouch!
Frankel apparently bases this self-assessment on her personal interactions with the professional art world, because the science world is justifiably gaga over her work. And I’m not sure why it wouldn’t be “art.” Frankel’s audio commentary on this slide show discusses the design and planning aspects of her process, and how she uses digital tools to refine her images (Frankel uses a Mac, of course.) But Frankel called her 2002 book Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image. Why design & craft, but not art? Simply because her pieces have a practical purpose?
Frankel says of the image at the top of this post, which appeared on the cover of Physics Today, “I’d like to think you are curious about it because of the way I photographed it. My hope is that you are going to want to ask questions about it.” (NYAS). That sounds like an artist to me. She also notes that she’s sick of it, because it has been reprinted so often. That sounds like a problem an artist would like to have. . .
I was browsing a few weeks of back posts on the yummy new blog musecrack, and this piece jumped out at me. The artist’s site is full of outstanding matte paintings and photomontage.
The image above is from the “sans nature, pas de futur” campaign at Fondation Nicolas Hulot. (You are supposed to be able to send an e-card with this and other images here, but it doesn’t work for me).
Portrait (thought to be of Charlotte Spaulding)
autochrome photograph
Edward Steichen, circa 1908
This is almost as good as discovering an unknown Klimt! Two Steichen autochromes (primitive color photographs) were recently donated to the George Eastman House collection of historic photographs. (Story - Sunday’s NYT)
The dreamy palette results from the primitive autochrome process. . . but I wouldn’t mind believing that light was just a different color in the first decades of this century. The last of the Gilded Age dwindling away, and all that.
Another Steichen photograph, The Pond-Moonlight (1904), sold for almost $3 million in 2006, well more than its weight in gold. The Pond-Moonlight is often described as autochrome, but predated Steichen’s adoption of the Lumiere autochrome process, which was not widely available until 1907. The Sotheby’s auction catalog listed it as multiple gum-bichromate print over platinum. (Not that I have any clue what that means.) The Pond-Moonlight was the most expensive photograph ever auctioned - until it was surpassed in 2007 by Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent II Diptychon.
