This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Sept. 12, 2011 - Exposure 14 at Gallery 210 presents a selection of artists marked by common interests in art's intersection with science.
They're not exactly unknowns in the region: Ron Leax is the firmly established head of sculpture at Washington University, widely exhibited and venerated; Greg Edmondson has made a name for himself in solo exhibitions and through his work at the Thomas Jefferson School; and Brigham Dimick, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, has enjoyed some prominent exposure via a 2009 solo exhibition at Webster's Cecille R. Hunt Gallery. But bringing them together was a stroke of genius on the part of Terry Suhre, Gallery 210's smart, hard-working curator.The exhibition is jam-packed with works informed by or generated from scientific laws and processes.
Dimick's works are stunning, old-master-inspired drawings and complex constructions involving bees and hives, inspired by his life-threatening allergies to insect stings. He employs bees to both produce and destroy proxies of his body, in a process that is equal parts existential quest and process art.
Leax ventures down a not-unrelated path, using organic samples like brain matter to populate petri dishes, to which he often adds colorful dyes, arranging them in regimented grid patterns. His works are the result of a complex dialectic relay between the aesthetic and the organic, between the subjective and the scientific.
Edmondson's materials are far more modest, comprised for the most part of pencil on vellum. He uses them to explore organic systems, their growth and breakdown -- entropy, crystallization, rhizometric growth. The simplicity of his works is refreshing after the conceptual and visual thickness of the works by Dimick and Leax. Particularly effective are Edmondson's stop-motion animated films, which recall early experiments in filmmaking as well as grade-school investigations into mathematics and science.
Be prepared to spend some time at Exposure 14, a dense exhibition that rewards close attention.
Ivy Cooper, a professor at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, is the Beacon's visual art reviewer.