Scope It: Stanton Fernald and Jack Rees enlighten us with medical supplies and plastic

By DANA SELF

published: February 21, 2008

Conceptual Play is an exhibition about how two artists are drawn to science and math to satisfy their artistic and theoretical impulses.

Stanton Fernald works as a graphic designer at the University of Kansas Medical Center, where he creates medical textbook illustrations. Emerging from this day job are Fernald's hand-built projectors — they look like massive microscope lenses — which are remarkable for their craftsmanship and an aesthetic that combines something out of A Clockwork Orange with the sort of Victorian apparatuses Charles Darwin encountered while sailing on the HMS Beagle. These projectors are crafted out of warm brass, copper and wood but are extremely aggressive — Victoriana meets cyborg. They're bolted to the wall and extend into the gallery space, only to face back toward the wall and project onto it. Despite their antique look, they feel threatening, as if they might silently turn and follow you around the gallery — or reach out and bore into your retina. It's a disquieting, Kubrick-like effect.

Mounted in groups of as many as five lenses, the pieces project images of such things as plant samples, the Pantheon's dome or a centipede. "Convalarium" and "Seminiferous Tubule" project beautiful, highly saturated greens, yellows and purples. Merging art, science and engineering, Fernald exposes the technology that produces images — light, that is — as an integral aesthetic in each piece. Basing his work on a confocal microscope — a valuable biomedical research tool that uses lasers to scan a thin layer of cells — Fernald makes visible that which is typically invisible.

Jack Rees also understands that all things are made visible through light, which exposes form. Whereas Fernald employs science, Rees uses geometry to make sense of the world. Rees, who has a master's degree in architectural studies, creates 3-D objects by printing on clear polycarbonate (essentially plastic). These pieces have a looser and more organic sensibility than Fernald's work; Rees calls them "Surforms" — forms perceived as surfaces. Rees says he doesn't think of them as art. Rather, he explains in an e-mail, "They are architecture in the small. Here is the issue as I see it: the perception of buildings with square corners is facilitated by sensors in our retina that are tuned to lines that are plumb and level." In other words, he's concerned with how we perceive new architectural protocols and shapes that don't conform to straight lines and angles. (Unfortunately, that might not be apparent for viewers who haven't exchanged e-mails with Rees.)

He has collaborated with Fernald on a couple of pieces in a series called "Array." One of the pieces simultaneously divides and unifies the separate spaces between works of the two artists, incorporating a Fernald projection onto Rees' plastic sheets with printed patterns (arrays). Daylight in the gallery interferes with the projection, though.

Rees' most successful work here is the oldest, which includes three iterations from 1994, 1999 and 2008. "Abcdefghijmr" consists of 12 panels on which Rees has printed densely colored patterns that create an intense optical sensation. The letters are visually buried, delineated by color change in each of the dense patterns; the multi-referential piece forces us to read and decode those buried letters. Each panel is flat and sculptural, both decorative and literary.