And the periodic emergence of reality makes us care about ‘Art & Science’

LINDA FROST’S “LATERAL VISION”

At the intersection of, well, art and science, you get “Art & Science,” the new 2nd City Council Gallery show—juried by a real live rocket scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Corby Waste. Sadly, Waste isn’t actually a rocket scientist; he’s a JPL computer graphic artist—but it sounds better if you say “rocket scientist.” A lesson in hucksterism which most of the artists in the show seem to have learned well.

Salesmanship in some form is inevitably what puts most art over, and many of these works have exactly enough of it to get our attention. Even if their hook is usually just something we’ve seen before, it’s deployed in ways new and strange enough to excite us—with the hint of a horrible experiment, a galaxy-sized fart or a vagina gone wrong. Excellent: capitalism rears its grizzled head again, proving you needn’t know Ohm’s Law or the Theory of Relativity to paint a good-looking painting. Even if you do.

Consider molecular biologist Nuvia Crisol Guerra’s brilliantly-hued four-panel, Uterine Cycle: each panel is a portrait of a strikingly beautiful woman, her expression slightly different each time. She sparks the piece, but behind her is what really brings it to life: what resembles an abstraction of the uterine cycle—graph lines and intestinal blots of colorful diagrams that recall Robert Williams’s Cowboys and Amoebas. Except here, Williams would have painted the whole uterus—and it would have completely distracted you. Guerra avoids that potential pitfall and, working in abstractions, keeps the focus on her lovely subject.

As does psychologist Michael Krapes (okay, so maybe everyone here is scientist or a doctor) with his gripping Felix Examines the Archetypes. Here, as Krapes writes in notes on the piece, it’s all about him: “My life is art and science, playful and serious” (with maybe just a hint of pretension). But why do we care? For the same reason we cared about Guerra: the bright, shiny, poppy things make us. With Guerra, it was graphs and (maybe) body parts. With Krapes, it’s Felix the Cat: blowing his nose in the corner or just grinning like a lizard, superimposed over the painting’s central image of a man on an X-ray table, the machine on full power with lightning bolts blazing. Krapes had us at X-rays and lightning bolts—but Felix clinches the deal.

Elsewhere, scenes we love; images we remember—and the chance of an alien abduction tonight—are just as riveting. B.S. Asdell admits borrowing from a Hubble Space Telescope photo for his Birth of Stars, but his take on purple-y gas clouds spitting out white new stars is just as vivid as anything from the Hubble.

Bill Collins mines the annual Burning Man festival for Extraterrestrial, a surreal photo montage of two stone busts of men—Easter Island writ small—gazing up to the blue night sky at a flying saucer. This being an assemblage, the spaceship is ringed in what resembles bits of a cyclone fence—and the man-busts are separated by a two-by-four wood frame. But these intrusions of reality read like a real alien-abduction dream (whatever that’s like).

Bringing you down to earth are two giclee prints by Linda Frost: Lateral Vision and Time and Space, both focusing on the plight of lab animals. Vision examines the rat: as skeleton; and with an X-ray view, its belly packed with pills. Microscope eyepieces and the biohazard symbol round out this cheery little number—though you really can’t stop looking. It’s as realistic a photo collage as you’ll see here. Time and Space dissects the white lab mouse, pointing out that scientists own the creature for its whole life, with views of the mouse as embryo and adult (seen from below, shot through glass, with plenty of mouse butt).

Far from the Space Age optimism that now seems so nostalgic—crew-cutted astronauts in Corvettes—or even from more distant works like Uterine Cycle that hint at their subjects, Frost shows science for what it is. Which is perhaps its true intersection with art.

ART & SCIENCE 2ND CITY COUNCIL GALLERY | 435 ALAMITOS AVE | LONG BEACH 90802 | 562.901.0997 | 2NDCITYCOUNCIL.ORG | WED-SUN 12-5 PM | THROUGH SEPT 6 | FREE

Tags: 2nd city council gallery, art, rats, reality, science