2008 Exhibit | How Does Your Garden Grow?
October 9 – November 14, 2008
Now open until December 4
Kemper Room Gallery, Galvin Library
Reception: Thursday, October 9, 2008
4:30 – 7 pm
5:30 pm "Time's Way, Time's Wear, and the Poetics of Shears"
Presentation by Peter Osler
Director of Landscape Architecture, College of Architecture at IIT
Experience the secret life of plants as captured by artists and scientists using x-ray and microscopic photography, time-lapse video and robot monitors.
Whether it is the delicate structures of flowers revealed in Steven Meyer's x-ray photography, nature's silent rhythms seen in Roger Hangarter's Plants in Motion videos, fluorescent plant cells in microscopic images by Michael Davidson, Peter Osler's photo essay, or David Bowen's growth charting robot, How Does Your Garden Grow? provides a new way of seeing and appreciating the plant life around us.
Information about the Artists
Steven Meyers is a radiographer and photographer based out of Seattle, WA. A gallery of his work is at www.xray-art.com
Roger Hangarter, Ph.D. is a professor of biology at Indiana University. The Plants in Motion video database is at http://plantsinmotion.bio.indiana.edu/plantmotion/starthere.html
David Bowen is an internationally-exhibiting artist and assistant professor of art and design at University of Minnesota at Duluth. The growth-rendering device forWildly Plantae and previews of additional art works by David Bowen that will be at IIT in spring 2009 can be found at http://www.dwbowen.com/
Michael Davidson is the director of the Optical Microscopy Division at Florida State University and a research scientist who has been involved with microscopy for the past 25 years. His photomicrography has won more than 40 awards in scientific and industrial photography competitions and he is the only two-time grand prize winner of the Polaroid International Photomicrography Competition; the images have appeared on the covers of over 600 scientific, industrial, and popular periodicals and books. Additional images can be found at: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/micro/gallery.html
Peter Osler is an Assistant Professor in the College of Architecture, where he directs the the Program in Landscape Architecture. The photographs and video included in this exhibit are part of a larger body of work produced during his 2001-2 residency at the American Academy in Rome as the Garden Club of America Rome Prize recipient.
Entitled "Time's Way, Time's Wear, and the Poetics of Shears", Osler's Rome Prize proposal grew from a frustration with how his carefully designed landscapes were often unsympathetically maintained, as well as a critical awareness of how contemporary tools and maintenance regimens were influencing his designs for historic properties such as the Cranbrook Educational Community in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The exhibited works are a reflection on the annual four month-long pruning effort at the gardens of Rome's Villa Aurelia.