Peter Krsko’s “Stabilimentia” on display at Olbrich Botanical Gardens.
Peter Krsko doesn’t consider himself to be an artist per se. He’s something of a nature hacker, using the mediums of art and science to illustrate concepts of biological diversity.
As part of his interdisciplinary residency at UW-Madison Arts Institute, Krsko taught a spring semester course titled “Zoethica: Bioinspired Art.” His work and that of his students is featured in an outdoor exhibition at Olbrich Botanical Gardens, on display through August 6.
Krkso’s unorthodox path to artist-in-residence included a Ph.D. in biophysics and a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health studying bacterial biofilms. Krsko recently moved to Wonewoc, and wants to continue his work combining art and science.
The Arts Institute has provided a user-friendly map to all of the Zoethica installations, with titles, artists’ descriptions and fabrication materials listed on the back. It’s like a scavenger hunt in a beautiful setting.
Krsko created five of the 21 Zoethica pieces, and his works are some of the show’s strongest. His “Stabilimentia” is made of green stretch wrap (think Saran) tightly wound around a network of trees. The stretchy material twists, turns and reflects light, evoking the patterns of a spider web. As I walked around the installation, a girl asked her friend, “Is it a bird catcher?” Krsko says he developed the piece after studying how “spiders create decorative elements within their webs to attract prey, to camouflage, to signal and to communicate.”
Many pieces in the Zoethica exhibit illustrate the intelligence of nature by mimicking it. Krsko’s students, along with guest artists Katie Schofield and Dan Steinhilber, reclaim the materials of industry and use them to make artistic, scientific and ethical statements.
In “Renewal,” Krsko points out the construction industry’s practice of transforming complex organisms into sterile, right-angled shapes. He reclaims their natural form by building trees from processed lumber slats, shingled on top of each other and splayed out. Krsko’s trees stand among the existing trees of Olbrich.
At a time when science has become highly politicized, many of the Zoethica pieces are surprisingly subtle. The pieces and accompanying descriptions draw the viewer’s attention to the details and dynamics of ecosystems, often allowing nature to demonstrate concepts of diversity and community.
Other pieces provide insights about neurons and autism spectrum disorder, non-Euclidean growth and hyperbolic paraboloids. It’s wonderfully nerdy, created mostly by undergraduate students of science, not art. “Conch Out,” by Halley Feil and Kevin Raymer, is a spiraling wood structure evocative of organisms that form shells from calcium carbonate in the oceans. The piece illustrates the disintegrating effect of excess carbon dioxide on these organisms. In “Neon Neurons,” Rebecca Green and Leo Steiner have installed neon-painted tubes of steel extending into the surrounding foliage. The tubes extend farther as one walks along the path, depicting the growth of neurons in the brain.
If you’re committed to finding each piece (it’s worth it), allow yourself plenty of time because some of the installations can be hard to find. You might also be distracted by the eye-popping foliage of Olbrich Gardens.
