Visiting artist creates visual ‘Duality’ through combination of art and science

When the complexity of physics and the art of photography combine, an interesting art exhibit is formed. On Feb. 18, photographer Michael Marshall showed his work at the Blackbridge Hall Gallery. Marshall has been a professor of the arts at the University of Georgia since 2001 and combines his love of science and art to form his artwork and the exhibit “Duality.”

“I am in museum studies and I helped set (this exhibit) up with the class. We met the artist this morning,” said freshman art history and political science major Jay Fickle. “All of his work is an attempt to understand the world from a scientific point of view and then a much broader point of view by using art.”

Katie Keller, a senior museum studies major who curated the museum for her senior capstone, said she put a lot of effort into choosing the work that best represented the artist.

“What I wanted to do was do a little survey of his work. A progression of his work throughout the years was something that I really wanted to focus on,” Keller said. “The very beginning is three works that are of the same place but over a certain period of time with three different mediums.”

The earliest piece in the series of three and of the whole exhibit was from 1994.

“It came here together as a little bit of a retrospective where we pulled just a couple of early pieces to show some of the root of where the idea started that eventually evolved into what you see in the rest of the show,” Marshall said.

The work ranges from pieces like “Geometry of Flight,” which layers a detailed diagram over an image of a bird wing, to more recent work like “Welcome,” which is an image of a Hindu woman.

“There are basically three different series: Spirit places, natural history, and then the encaustic work. What the artist was trying to do through the years was to layer to have a conversation,” Keller said.

Along with the many layers of messages and ideas were the many different ways that Marshall created the work. One in particular was an antiquated process of developing his film to give it a warm, inviting glow.

“It’s a 19th century printing process called platinum printing so we refer to it as a historic process,” Marshall said.

“You don’t buy a box of platinum paper like you do a traditional silver based photo paper. Instead you buy solutions and you coat it onto paper with a paintbrush.

The film is not sensitive to tungsten light, but it is sensitive to UV light in sunlight and it’s very slow. It does have a very particular visual sensibility and a particular tonal scale and warmer color.”

With some of Marshall’s more recent work, he has taken it to the next level by adding different textures and layers to further the art.

“With some of the works he takes this Japanese mulberry paper, like a tissue paper, and he prints out an image. Then it shows a distorted image of the picture behind it,” Keller said.

All of these elements pool together to form the general concept and mindset of the artist.

“The root of the work and the idea of the title “Duality” comes from this idea of two different ways of viewing the world, one being more of an intellectual and the other being more intuitive or emotional or spiritual,” Marshall said. “As I come into a situation, both sides of my brain are experiencing different things. They don’t necessarily say the same thing or have the same experience even though they are both in one place.”

Posted by Joanna Sullivan on Feb 26 2010. Filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry