Incised into stones or painted on cave walls, images of nature are the oldest known artistic subjects. Forty or so millennia later, flora and fauna remain popular motifs, but a new sort of nature art has arrived, at least in the Washington area. Local exhibition spaces — some, but not all, connected to scientific institutions — are displaying work that depicts worlds too small or too big to be perceived by the unaided human eye.
One explanation is simply that people now can see many things that were previously imperceptible, thanks to devices such as electron microscopes and the Hubble Space Telescope. Advancing scientific knowledge also offers new conceptual subjects, on both cosmic and microscopic scales.
There’s a shift from poetic, humanistic and spiritual themes, which perhaps seem too vague amid the current fashion for “data-driven” thinking. Technology is now widely considered benign and even liberating, which it wasn’t during, say, the Industrial Revolution. Yet much contemporary science-minded art is concerned with such tech-driven threats as species extinction and global climate change.
The latter is the impetus for “Endangered: From Glaciers to Reefs,” Diane Burko’s show at the National Academy of Sciences. The Philadelphia painter-photographer compounds art and science in near-abstractions layered atop oceanographic charts. Burko began by collaborating with glaciologists to depict retreating ice at both poles, a project documented in a 12-minute video that melds footage of ocean waves and flowing paint.
