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Show features all 118 elements.

Artists celebrate chemistry's gifts

In "Elemental Matters" at the Chemical Heritage Foundation is Canadian artist David Clark's "I don’t think you understand the way I feel about the stove" made of 118 old electric-stove coils. The show is part of the U.S. launch of the 2011 International Year of Chemistry.  (Photo: Conrad Erb)
In "Elemental Matters" at the Chemical Heritage Foundation is Canadian artist David Clark's "I don’t think you understand the way I feel about the stove" made of 118 old electric-stove coils. The show is part of the U.S. launch of the 2011 International Year of Chemistry. (Photo: Conrad Erb)Read more

An alluring, mysterious feast for the eyes awaits you at "Elemental Matters: Artists Imagine Chemistry" at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, which organized it. Those ever-present yet elusive chemical elements are the building blocks of our world.

"Elemental Matters" is one of a series of kickoff events across the country for the U.S. launch of the 2011 International Year of Chemistry. This show, like the worldwide celebration, focuses on chemistry's contributions to the well-being of mankind.

A year and a half in preparation, the exhibit features seven artists. Each has invented a different way of experiencing the elements and periodic table, to reconnect us to the matter inside and around us. The show sets all 118 elements before us in periodic-table formation, as if we were standing before a holiday table laden with lots of tasty items.

Straightaway comes David Clark of Halifax with a large-wall piece, comforting in its kitchen-cozy familiarity: It's made entirely of 118 old electric-stove coils lined up as a grid. Called I don't think you understand the way I feel about the stove, it encourages us to see the world with "chemical vision," something requiring no wordy wall signs or encumbrances.

Brigitte Hitschler of Germany achieved a difficult outdoor installation at an abandoned mine, using chemical implants that in their reactions illuminated hundreds of red LED lights, visible from the air as mysterious red dots; her piece symbolizes the past and further energy potential of land. A different sort of labor-intensive approach is displayed in the fruits of Jennifer Schmitt's Periodic Table Printmaking Project, for which she rounded up 118 prints by 97 artists that comment on the elements and everyday life.

The show's artists explore the elements as symbol, raw material, or energy. One among them who manages to transform chemistry's ordinary associations into something genuinely surprising and evocative is Dove Bradshaw. In beautiful photos of nude figures inscribed with lists of the elemental components of the human body; in one of her "Waterstone" series (water dripping deeply into limestone); or, in Self Interest, 57 tiny glass flasks sized proportionately to represent the elements that make up a 100-pound body, Bradshaw shows a deep understanding of what builds and unbuilds the universe.

This is a brilliant and timely show.

Pop art

"Haunted Philadelphia," a small show of photos and pop-ups by area artist Colette Fu at the Athenaeum, has a way of conveying continuity with the past - particularly Philadelphia's reputation as one of America's most ghost-ridden cities - while embracing the present. Influenced by encountering the Robert Sabuda Wonderful Wizard of Oz pop-up book (2003) on view here from the Nan Gutterman pop-up collection, Fu employs both old local newspapers and Chinese joss paper - "ghost money" - in 10 of her own pop-ups, each 36 by 53 inches. Her subjects, in these and in her photographs: landmarks ranging from Fort Mifflin to Eastern State Penitentiary, the Moshulu to City Hall.

At the nearby MUSE Gallery is artist Drew Zimmerman's solo show, "Do I Amuse You?" which had a pop-up invitation to its opening and which features sculptural and relief works in papier-mache, from portraits to puppets and much in between.

An interesting bit of coincidence and timing for these two boundary-breaking artists.

Wallingford's 'In Person'

For a few weeks every other year, the Wallingford Community Arts Center mounts a juried show of the human figure. For the current "In Person" exhibitions, judge David McShane chose 58 works from 1,004 entries, producing a significant display of artistic life in our region.

The best-in-show award deservedly goes to Apparition, a charcoal drawing by Peter Smyth of Upper Darby in which one senses the extremity of Smyth's awareness of danger and vulnerability. In visual terms alone, this mysterious, darkling piece assaults the viewer with unusual power - doubtless because its beauty is so inherently part of the impact of psychological violence on the naked man cowering beneath a table for safety as the dog sitting atop it calmly gazes at us.

The show contains a number of technologically adept portrait paintings seemingly influenced, directly or indirectly, by local painter Nelson Shanks. Several capable studio nude subjects won special recognition from McShane. Also noteworthy are a few people paintings with a sophisticated degree of finish in pastel, at least one promising attempt at allegory, and a couple of informal portraits.