Review | Do Plankton Have Feelings?
Installation view of Do Plankton Have Feelings? at Artspace New Haven, CT. Photo: J. Gleisner.
On a pedestal in the center of Artspace’s Project Room, new media artist and educator Cynthia Beth Rubin has assembled an assortment of objects—small, translucent vessels that mimic the volumes of various forms of plankton. Scientists from the Menden-Deuer lab at the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, with whom the artist has collaborated over the past six years, approved each of these objects. One resembles a soda bottle with a vertical barrel that tapers to a narrow opening. Another has a bulbous base. These three-dimensional models represent the microscopic organisms in Rubin’s newest works: A series of digitally-altered images of microscopic plankton, printed on fabric, that comprise half of Rubin’s solo show, Do Plankton Have Feelings?, on view through the end of February.
“Plankton may not have human-like emotions, but we can certainly have feelings for them,” states Rubin. And we should feel for them because plankton are among the most vital organisms on earth. They account for a significant portion of the air we breathe and they are the foundation of the ocean’s ecosystem, without which marine life would collapse. Rubin’s objective is to inspire affection for these (mostly) invisible micro-organisms and this plea for inter-species empathy forms the crux of her compact show.
The five new works that float from the ceiling along one corner of the room originated from photographic source material gathered from oceans in the North Atlantic, Antarctica, the Pacific Northwest, and Narragansett Bay. Rubin transforms these images using expressive marks and digital painting techniques, bringing the aesthetic of Neo-Expressionism to a scientific subject. Georg Baselitz meets a marine biology textbook. Others more closely resemble the merger of a blacklight poster with a textbook illustration. Repetitive veils of shocking color bring a hallucinatory vibe to the works, as they sway gently inside the space.
These unlikely aesthetic marriages undoubtedly lure some viewers, particularly those enticed by Rubin’s loud palette and wild marks. Her hot hand is tempered by the fact that these works are reproduced from digital files. Her style carries the semblance of the unique aura of a singular painting or perhaps, a juicy oil stick drawing, but Rubin leaves a thin border around each of the works, emphasizing their printed nature.
Installation view of Do Plankton Have Feelings? at Artspace New Haven, CT. Photo: J. Gleisner.
Opposite these prints, a long, horizontal scene fills an eye-level band of the white gallery wall. Rubin conflated numerous photographs of the deep sea to build this backdrop. Using the iPad in the center of the gallery, viewers can comb this landscape using an Augmented Reality software program that makes drawings appear on the small screen. These colorful renderings on white backgrounds function like abrupt sticky-notes inside the oceanic wallpaper. Their sudden appearance on-screen polarizes the exotic, digitally-produced vista and the energetic yet stagnant depictions of the plankton, which are sometimes crude.
The intricacies and depth of the ocean scenery exude sophistication, showing the possible strength of an image buttressed by technology. The embedded drawings, by contrast, seem simple and are, at worst, easily dismissed. Satisfaction comes from finding these works—or potentially, recognizing the name of the artist—within the banner, not from examining or appreciating them by their own merits. Because the drawings are fixed in space, viewers can move around them quickly to find the next hidden work, with little incentive to revisit these works.
This collection of sketches comes from two Plankton Drawing Workshops, hosted by the New Haven Public Library. As the facilitator, Rubin encouraged participants to draw with their bodies, not their wrists, connecting the urgency of one’s marks with the importance of the subject matter, explained curator Sarah Fritchey during a press preview for the exhibition. Yet the physicality of the drawings is wasted when translated into a flat digital image. Could these drawings have embodied more of the bold movements mandated by Rubin if they had become animated in some way?
More meaningful than the products of Rubin’s collaboration with the Menden-Deuer lab are the possibilities that this relationship encourages. Scientists and artists, frequently poised at odds with one another, collectively engender sums greater than their respective parts. Rubin brings pathos to plankton and she sneaks in a light educational component to the work with help from a team of scientists. Far from didactic, Rubin’s solo show aims to foster an appreciation for these extraordinary lifeforms, however unfeeling they may be.
