Sensuous Science. - Review - book review

Afterimage, Sept, 2000 by Thomas Mcgovern

Susan Rankaitis: Drawn from Science

Museum of Photographic Arts

San Diego, California

June 4-August 13, 2000

Susan Rankaitis: Drawn from Science

San Diego, CA: Museum of Photographic Arts, 2000

24 pp./$18.95 (sb)

Photography has the unique role of being the first art medium developed through scientific investigation and so it is not surprising that the discovery was first announced at a joint meeting of the French Academies of Sciences and of Fine Arts, on August 19, 1839. Photography and science have shared a mutually beneficial relationship ever since. Discoveries in chemistry and optics have continued to advance photographic materials and processes and the medium's verisimilitude has facilitated the discovery, documentation and verification of scientific theory and phenomena. Susan Rankaitis's exhibition at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, "Drawn from Science," furthers this symbiotic relationship in new and unexpected ways.

The exhibition presents 12 years of work inspired by scientific theories. The 32 objects included range from small framed photographs to free-standing photo-sculptures to a descending spiral of huge color transparencies hung from the ceiling. The works function in terms of thematic series--"DNA," "Technology" and "Complexity"--that articulate their scientific inspiration. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with an excellent essay by curator Diana Gaston. Gaston explains that Rankaitis has been interested in science since her childhood in Chicago and that she continues to read and investigate the areas of human genome mapping and chaos theory and has ongoing contact with scientists.

While this background may be unusual, it is not unique. What is unique is Rankaitis's ability to investigate parallel areas of scientific discovery via photography and to present her findings in a non-representational manner. In the past, photography in the service of science has operated as illustrative evidence. Eadweard Muybridge's 1872 photographs of the race horse Occident not only won a wager for his patron, but demonstrated facts of animal locomotion. Harold Edgerton's photographs of balloons popping and crowns of milk drops make great greeting cards but also show us what the world looks like at 1/100,000 of a second.

But Rankaitis's photography attempts to demonstrate the complexity and profundity of scientific theory without ever showing it directly to us. Through an amalgam of imagery produced from original and appropriated negatives, text and photograms enhanced by an elaborate metamorphosis of the surface that includes painting and drawing, the artist creates works that simultaneously suggest genetic codes and aerial views, brain patterns and weather maps, pure chaos and sublime order. This is primarily done through Rankaitis's original surface treatment, and demonstrates her continuing commitment to expanding the very definition of photographic process and imagery. Applying toners, bleach, graphite, colored pencils, painting washes and emulsions onto photographic paper, Rankaitis transforms a sheet of silver gelatin photographic paper into an iridescent and richly nuanced object, emotionally powerful and intellectually provocative. It is hard to call her unique process a surface treatment, a term more often applied to interior decoration than great art, but that is exactly what it is.

Trained as a painter and influenced by Abstract Expressionism, Rankaitis realized the potential for melding painting and photography after seeing the experimental photograms of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Combining the brush stroke, abstraction and scale of painting with the tonalities, printing methods and creative potential of photographic chemistry, Rankaitis's photographs are one-of-a-kind images. She has been developing her various techniques since 1977 and is certainly the most successful artist to mix these diverse media. But even more challenging to photographic orthodoxy than her blending of mediums is the fact that Rankaitis works and re-works each photograph over a long period of time, a truly unique endeavor in the field, bringing the images to fruition by pushing them to the brink of indecipherable chaos.

Rankaitis's fascination with genetics is manifest in seven works from her "DNA" series. In A and C (1992-94) the artist incorporates her photographic imagery with sculptural forms. The nearly seven-foot high letters assembled from discarded industrial equipment signify two of the four letters that represent the base nucleotides that comprise the DNA chain. An essential component of the work is a rolling track of about one hundred tiny steel wheels integrated into each piece, mimicking the genetic message chain. On these elegant objects are large photographs of murky, unreadable golden-brown and black imagery. Swirls and blotches of overlapping brush strokes and a few white semicircles give the simultaneous impression of deep space and microphotography. Their fine craftsmanship and elegance balance their chaotic, abstract imagery.