One of Kellie Bornhoft’s banners, featuring a Williston’s Tiger Beetle, beneath Dana Kuglin’s multi-floor sculpture “The Butterfly” in Westminster University’s Meldrum Science Center. Image by Geoff Wichert.
The various laboratories and classrooms of Westminster University’s Meldrum Science Center are where the enterprise of science is both conducted and handed down to the next generation. These rooms are arranged around the rectangular perimeter of the Center, forming squared rings that are stacked into four stories that leave the center open. This atrium extends from the ground floor up to a skylight far above, with stairs that zig-zag back and forth along one side. “The Butterfly,” as sculptor Dana Kuglin affectionately calls it, extends down from the skylight and stops just high enough not to endanger anyone walking in the foyer on the ground floor. This is the spot chosen by Kellie Bornhoft for the present iteration of her installation, By a Thread, which after finishing here in late November will begin a tour to include Marmalade Library, the State Capitol, UMOCA and Farmington Bay, before winding up, for now, at Ogden’s Dumke Arts Plaza in June.
“The Butterfly” is a superb choice, having been based on the double helix of the DNA molecule, one spiral of which is made up by the wings, transparent horizontal panels that are balanced by the other spiral, comprised of counterweights that support the weight of the wings. Together, the tapering spiral captures the eye and leads it to Bornhoft’s metaphor for the life that is endemic to, or depends upon, the Great Salt Lake, which she argues hangs like a thread in what has always been a struggle for survival, but one in which they and—we may as well add—all living things now share a common, mortal threat.
The congregation of science and art taking shape around the Meldrum Center finds an appropriate theme here. It was experts like Dr. Bonnie Baxter of the University’s Great Salt Lake Institute, along with Paul Thompson and John Luft of the Utah Department of Natural Resources, who helped artist Bornhoft compile her list of subjects. With that list, she conceived the stunning metaphor of printing their images on variously-colored, flag-like squares of translucent silk that she assembles into clusters, so the intermingling of species that is a fundamental property of all biology becomes visibly apparent. When looking at one, it’s inevitable to see through it to others, while yet more creatures are nearby.
Visitors admire Kellie Bornhoft’s “By a Thread,” the first in the Wake the Great Salt Lake series of temporary art projects administered by the Salt Lake City Arts Council. Image by Geoff Wichert.
From bacteria to small plants and animals all the way up to the climax species that humans identify with, the three-dimensional reality of what makes up an environmental niche becomes real here. That the images that form the artist’s sources are drawn from the same photographic Creative Commons that scientists rely on completes the circle of willing knowledge, which also propels all those doing whatever they can to help the Lake and its denizens recover as quickly and completely as possible.
It’s one of the privileges of art to fill the gaps in what we know with imagination and invention—a fine idea so long as we remember that science fiction is still fiction. Kellie Bornhoft and Bonnie Baxter, though, remind us that our imaginations pale compared to the creativity of nature. Among the 64 species included in By a Thread are some that defeat efforts to photograph them, that rely for now on eyewitnesses to tell us what they look like. Frilli Boi is the interim name of an algae, still lacking a formal title, that was found in a place that sounds like science fiction but is quite real. Microbialites are living, calcified rock matter that take 12,000 years to reach the form in which they are found in the Great Salt Lake. Ask the hosts at any of the installations to explain why these organisms can be compared to the Pioneer Species that are the first to grow back after a forest fire. They stand ready and eager to tell us all about these and other astonishing, living beings found (so far) nowhere else but in our local lake.
40 of the 64 species featured in Bornhoft’s installation. Image by Geoff Wichert.
Kellie Bornhoft: By a Thread, Meldrum Science Center, Westminster University, Salt Lake City, through Nov. 25
Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts
