Felice Frankel at Haverford College

In
2 minute read
678 Ferrofluid
Seeing is learning

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

Felice Frankel’s work reveals to the layman’s eye the beauties of a world too small to be seen yet impossible to ignore since it’s everywhere around us. Her images of elements and compounds— occasionally at rest, but more often undergoing reactions of some kind— are astonishing in their beauty and intricacy.

What’s more, the works are designed to teach the mind as well as please the eye. Sometimes, as when Frankel photographs drops of water beading on a sheet of gold to demonstrate gold’s hydrophobic property, she presents things as they are. At other times, as with Plastic Interference, one of the show’s more beautiful images, she benefits from the sort of accident that science is rife with—in this case, the plastic sample to be photographed folded rather than remaining flat.

Frankel is an artist and, in works like Laminar Flow, she’s not afraid to introduce her own sensibility into an otherwise straightforward image, thus arriving at a multi-hued, tree-like affair. It’s laminar flow all right, but not the laminar flow you’re likely to see in your everyday lab work.

The presentation of these images is unique as well. There are about two dozen of them, and rather than enlarging, framing and hanging the lot of them, Ferrofluid, an impossibly intricate-looking affair, is presented in the standard format, accompanied by an interactive display that allows the gallery viewer to observe the phenomenon that Frankel has photographed. Then five large-screen TVs are arranged along two walls with a bench between. Here you sit and watch a presentation of all 24 images as they zigzag past you like stations seen from the windows of a moving train. The loops play continuously, so can watch until either your senses become sated or you begin to understand what you’re seeing. Believe me, science never looked so inviting.


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