Worlds Within

Worlds Within was a unique collaboration between Rob Kesseler, the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation and The Miller Gallery, two venues, at either end of the Carnegie Mellon University campus. The exhibition celebrated the extraordinary aesthetic interrelationships between historically different methods of visually interpreting the wonders of botanical phenomena, which are not readily visible to the naked eye. The graphic impact of historical instructive botanical wall charts was propsed through the juxtaposition with a collection of Kesseler's monumentalized, hand-coloured micrographs of seeds and pollen. Using a selection of newly configured and specially created images the exhibition constructed a remarkable visual bridge between the conventional purpose of scientific illustration as used in educational materials, and the aesthetic interpretation of scientific imagery in contemporary art.

At the Hunt Institute the work was shown alongside 19th-century botanical wall charts from Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny’s series Botanische Wandtafeln, restored specifically for the exhibition. Complementing the forms represented in these charts and photographs were a selection of models of marine organisms made of glass in the 19th-century by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka and made of glacite in the early 20th-century by Edwin H. Reiber on loan from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The Miller Gallery exhibition featured further juxtaposed pairings and a fuller range of Kesseler's recent micro images. Both sections of this joint exhibition celebrated the extraordinary aesthetic interrelationships between historically different methods of visually interpreting the wonders of botanical phenomena, which are not readily visible to the naked eye. A new video work Like unto each form yet none alike, was specially created for the exhibition. The title of the video is a line taken from the poem The Metamorphosis of Plants by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe from his book of the same name. From his investigation into plant form he envisioned a more holistic way of experiencing nature beyond the detached classification of the Linnean system in which plants are experienced both symbolically and scientifically. The movie presents a succession of pollen grains, seeds and plant details that appear in a continuous stream, each fusing with the next, a lineage of “supersensuous archetypes”.

Panel Discussion "The artist in the lab, the scientist in the studio"
Co-Presented by The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. Carnegie Mellon University. Rob Kesseler, Worlds Within artist, and Steve Tonsor, Director of Science and Research, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and moderator Edith Doron, Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow, Senior Manager of Carnegie Nexus, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, will discuss how the relationships between artists and scientists have evolved into research partnerships and the potential avenues for the intersections of these two disciplines in the future.

• http://millergallery.cfa.cmu.edu/exhibit...
• http://sparkedscienceart.com/2017/10/15/...