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The wonderful thing about working alongside the naturetech exhibit has been studying the artwork itself. Since I saw the first images of the artwork we would be researching and writing about, I fell in love. However I felt very silly when I walked into the Fitchburg Art Museum the other day to view the exhibit for the first time. I felt much like a kid in a toy shop. I was stunned at seeing the works in person, and realized I'd been missing out on the extreme detail that each artist put into their work. I felt like I had been missing out on the experience of seeing the works in real life and couldn't take my eyes off of them.
This was especially apparent for me with the works of Crist Rinklin as I became a bit entranced with her extremely powerful virtual reality landscapes. I stared at "Arcadia" for a very long time, noticing all the subtle details I hadn't noticed in the pictures we'd been working with. "After the End of the Beginning" is the work in the picture to the right and is one of my personal favorites.
Rinklin's works are wonderfully abstract and contain such vibrant colors that you often think you're looking at an optical illusion. Different forms in the painting push forward and backward the longer you study them. Many of Rinklin's works live at such a heightned sense of reality that you think you could slip right into the unearthly world on the other side of the canvas.
As I studied these paintings I rememberd the research I had done on Rinklin's technique. Rinklin uses digital images and enhances them using billowing and wipsy forms to create a sense of the abstract. Rinklin's main goal is to use digital technology to create a sense of virtual reality. She is inspired intensely by the landscape paintings of the Baroque period and even Japanese Pictorial Landscapes, which can be seen in her newer works.
What was also interesting about Rinklin's gallery was the flow between her older works and her newest. Mary Tinti, the curator of the naturetech exhibit and our guide, had a wonderful way of describing the the flow of color between these two periods in Rinklin's work. So if you visit naturetech anytime soon don't be shy! If you see Mary, ask for her interesting view of Rinklin's work as she has been entranced in the colors and layers much longer than I have!