Poetic Lyricism, Poise in the Art of ‘Science’

SAN DIEGO — Until the 1980s, the question of how to reconcile the imaginative realm of painting and the reality-based world of photography was a strong undercurrent in art. For 140 years, the subject was fraught.

Susan Rankaitis is among those artists for whom the question has had a special resonance. I think of Rankaitis as a painter. Yet a pretty clear indication that things are not quite so clear-cut is the simple fact that the Museum of Photographic Arts decided on a survey of her recent work as the first exhibition organized for its terrific new home in San Diego’s Balboa Park.

Guest curator (and former Museum of Photographic Arts staffer) Diana Gaston has assembled 14 paintings, four sculptures and 14 drawings by the Los Angeles-based artist for “Susan Rankaitis: Drawn From Science.” The show emphasizes the poetic lyricism of her approach and the historical connection between science and photography. (Sir John F.W. Herschel, a British astronomer and scientist, coined the word “photography.”)

As it is for German painter Sigmar Polke, the camera is only a tool for Rankaitis, little different from a pencil or a brush. But photography involves a scientific process endowed with marvelous, almost magical overtones, which are deliberately courted in her work.

In fact, the burnished surfaces of Rankaitis’ paintings recall nothing so much as a 19th century daguerreotype. Exposing polished silver-coated copper plates to light and chemicals produced daguerreotypes--the first images ever made with a camera. The dark, smoky picture that formed on the shiny surface possesses the fleeting, evanescent quality of a shadow-image caught in a mirror.

On photographic paper, Rankaitis manipulates chemicals, light and negatives of her making. The results seem more like paintings than photographs. Her negatives record a wide range of subjects, from landscapes to fragments of printed text. The sheets are often large, reaching many feet on a side, although a dozen drawings in the Museum of Photographic Arts show are diminutive.

The interaction of chemicals and light on a silvered surface yields a rich, metallic sheen, which seems to rise up out of velvety blackness, while the bits of image float through the murky and evocative space. Close scrutiny reveals a remarkable array of colors flickering across her atmospheric pictures, from deep reds and violets to verdant green and a wide range of golden hues. (Think of oil floating on the surface of a puddle, which refracts the light.) Sometimes Rankaitis adds small amounts of paint to further articulate a shape.

“Two Black Planes” (1988) is one of two early photographic paintings in the show, which focuses on works from the past decade. The tall, vertical picture has something of the look of a Chinese landscape painting cross-pollinated with a strip of film. Two dark, ominous shadows overlap, creating glimpses of an airplane that seems to stutter in space, as if falling from the sky.

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Similarly, 1988’s “Phantom” has an industrial feel, although here it’s suggestions of a tumultuous landscape that are the focus. As is common in Chinese painting, your eye enters the painted field and goes on a journey. The passage of time becomes an elemental ingredient of the picture.

In both “Phantom” and “Two Black Planes,” the imagery is more suggestive than descriptive. Rankaitis paints lyrical abstractions that seem precariously balanced between emergence and disintegration, origination and disappearance. With the modern camera process as its agent, it’s a high-tech version of primordial soup. A sense of perilous poise and careful equilibrium carries the day.

The more recent work from the 1990s has evolved from the artist’s interest in such scientific subjects as DNA and cloning. Double helixes and the famous face of Dolly, the genetically engineered sheep, peek out from various pictures.

Still, it’s almost always impossible to know exactly what was photographed to make them. Rankaitis uses negatives to create spatial layers, visual trajectories and optical pathways, not to document specific objects.

The 1990s’ shift away from hard industry and toward internal chemistry--from high-tech to biotech, as it were--has yielded some exquisite works. A swirl of light rising into a skull-like form dominates “DNA 93-1,” as if consciousness is being made palpable through the juxtaposition of light and death. In “DNA 6,” a long, vertical stalk appears spinal, plant-like and electrical all at once, as it courses through the atmospheric space.

The strongest works in the show are often the largest. “Cell” spreads across a 12-foot expanse, creating a vast stage for the visual drama of its intimate parts. “Gold Science Ghost Drawing #1” is an irregularly shaped rectangle more than 5 feet wide and 4 high, where two circular areas of clear light seem to burn through the shimmering, vaporous veil of metallic color that pours down the surface.

Less successful are the four sculptures. “Rocket Lure” is a 10-foot-tall cone whose metallic surface and stenciled printing combine to give it the military look of a fuselage. “C” and “A,” each of which are part of the larger DNA series, attach two-sided photographic surfaces to the machine apparatus from a conveyor belt to form free-standing letters of the alphabet. “Great Salt Lake Installation #2,” dramatically suspended amid skylights from the ceiling in the atrium lobby, unfurls its big, nearly indecipherable photographic transparencies in a spiral 16 feet in diameter, like a gigantic spool of film.

Rather than enhancing the imaginative play essential to Rankaitis’ art, sculpture’s third dimension lends an element of physical materiality that instead subverts it.

The fuselage becomes an oddly decorated object, its ominous cone incongruously adorned with exquisitely mottled patterns of platinum, bronze and gold. The alphabet letters, which represent two of the base nucleotides that compose the DNA chain, turn into toy-like educational displays. The dramatic spiral coil of the atrium installation reads first as a limiting art-historical reference to Robert Smithson’s pivotal Earthwork, “The Spiral Jetty,” now submerged in the Great Salt Lake that is photographically represented in the work’s pale color transparencies.

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By contrast, the most recent piece in the exhibition finds a way to incorporate actual space without resorting to sculptural means, to create a much more satisfying experience. “Pathfinder on the Beach” is a multiple-panel mural--the traditional method by which paintings become environmental.

Through compositional means, Rankaitis further coaxes her painting out onto the gallery wall. Yellow, orange, blue, green and white adhesive stickers in the shape of circles and stars are used to create linear designs of loops, arcs and nascent spirals. They draw the lyrical abstraction within the painting outside the frame and onto the surrounding wall, deftly knitting the imaginative wonderment of “Pathfinder on the Beach” into the actual space a viewer also occupies.

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* “Susan Rankaitis: Drawn From Science,” Museum of Photographic Arts, 1649 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, (619) 238-7559, through Aug. 13. Open daily.