The new exhibition at Jerusalem’s Bloomfield Science Museum titled Point of View couldn’t have come at a better time. With elections nearing and Israelis split into antagonistic factions, seeing things clearly from another’s perspective is an imperative.
The exhibition, installed just beyond the entrance, brings to Israel, for the first time, the extraordinary works of artist and scientist Jonty Hurwitz, one of the world’s most prominent creators exploring the connections among art, science, and visual perception.
The exhibition will introduce you to a world of optical illusions, anamorphic sculptures, and surprising works that appear abstract at first glance but become clear only when viewed from a certain angle or through precise reflection.
It is an interactive experience in which the viewer doesn’t just observe the works but becomes an active participant in an intriguing journey that links physics, mathematics, optics, and imagination.
The exhibition also deals with questions of identity, memory, environment, and peace, and invites us to rethink the way we see and interpret the world.
After being presented in leading international museums around the world, the exhibition will be on display in Jerusalem until May of next year.
Hurwitz is a South African-born, London-based Jewish artist and engineer praised for his mind-bending sculptures and renowned for pioneering 3D anamorphic art and creating Guinness World Record-breaking nano-sculptures. His work challenges audiences to question the boundary between reality and human cognition.
Microscopically small portraits
Using advanced multiphoton lithography, he has created portraits so small that they sit comfortably on a human hair or the head of an ant. These pieces are invisible to the naked eye and can be seen only by using a scanning electron microscope.
Among the works in the exhibition is a sculpture that broke the Guinness World Record: The Fragile Giant – a nano-sculpture of an elephant created with advanced technology and invisible to the naked eye, with help from researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
A large image of an elephant is shown on the wall atop a flesh-colored surface. In fact, if you look through a special microscope on a table near it, the elephant can be identified as a tiny pachyderm perched on top of a human finger.
Also on display are nearly 20 anamorphic sculptures: Hurwitz created seemingly chaotic, colorful abstract shapes that reveal their true figurative form (e.g., a frog or a human face) only when viewed at a precise angle or reflected in a polished cylindrical mirror.
Each piece requires up to a billion complex calculations.
From one angle, one can see pottery pieces hanging from the top or colored structures attached to the base; when looking through a round metal ring, they line up to create amazing 3-D images – a human face, a dancing woman, a galloping horse, and more. There are also flat paintings on the wall that, when viewed from a distance, turn from a nature scene into an eye.
In the glass cases installed on the floor are drawings and a cone-shaped mirror. When you look directly at the sharp edge of the cone, a different image appears.
His work is heavily inspired by Leonardo da Vinci, the Italian genius who was a painter, draftsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect, who died six centuries ago, and M.C. Escher, the Dutch graphic artist who made woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, many of which were inspired by mathematics, to show viewers that the perceived chaos in our lives is often simply a matter of perspective.
Advanced, interactive machines invented by Leonardo are exhibited on a higher floor in the museum.
Hurwitz’s ‘first love’
In a TED talk about his work, Hurwitz – who is now 56 years old – presented a nano-sculpture of his “first love” whom he met as a teen. It’s a tiny particle, but when he published what the sculpture really looked like on his website in 2013, over 100 million people viewed it online.
He and his loved one had to part when he left South Africa for England to study engineering, but fate brought them together again 26 years later, and he married her at 50.
“It couldn’t have been created at any other time in history,” he said. “It is just 100 microns, one tenth of a millimeter in height – made of two photons that are particles of light and much smaller than an atom. It wasn’t the smallest particle to be created, but it was the smallest sculpture ever created.”
Eleven years ago, Hurwitz was made a member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. In a 2015 documentary by CNN International on Hurwitz’s artwork, the BBC Radio art critic said: “If Leonardo da Vinci were alive today, he would have been doing what Jonty is doing. He would have been using algorithms. No one else works like him today. His art is the mix between the emotional and the intelligent, and that’s what gives it that spark.”
While you are at Bloomfield, it’s worthwhile to walk further inside for an exhibit showing the launch and landing at sea of SpaceX flight Axiom Mission in April 2022, the first-ever fully private astronaut mission to the International Space Station.
One of those on board was Eitan Stibbe, a former Israel Air Force fighter pilot, who carried out scientific, technological, and educational experiments on his self-funded, privately launched mission.
Near the Point of View exhibit, staff members spray alcohol into plastic bottles and insert a lit sparkler to make them fly around the room.
They also explain the history of space travel, starting with Laika, a stray mongrel from the streets of Moscow, who was launched into space by the Soviets and became the first animal to orbit the Earth in 1957. Laika tragically died just hours into the flight due to overheating and panic.
For more information: mada.org.il/en
Source:
www.jpost.com
