About the Artist
An excerpt from
"A Pendulum Motion between Art and Science"
by Hilde Van Gelder
Jeffrey Wyckoff uses his own scientific findings as a medium to make works of art. Science to him is a tool. It is the smallest common denominator out of which grows an extremely varied artistic production. When he employs traditional artistic media such as those of drawing, painting, sculpture and photography, science is used as their subject matter. Reversely, when Wyckoff works with scientific materials like microslides and petri dishes, the images that are transferred onto them contain references to the history of photography and of art in general.
The particular richness of Wyckoff's work comes
forth out of this permanent oscillation and interchange between two
very different systems in our society: science and art. Fascinated by
the chaotic beauty of the microscopic, he translates these
impressions to macroscopic images. On this ordered level, the blown-up scientific elements operate as aesthetic works of art, and have become part of a different system of meaning.
For example, the silkscreens representing enlarged cells
have the subtle coloristic effect of an abstract painting.
Not only is science experienced as art, but art also is seen as a
science. Wyckoff skillfully explores all available
artistic media as a kind of laboratory to his unique disposition to question and transpose the
traditional meaning attached to the labels of science and art.
Wyckoff's work constantly displaces meanings. The
beauty of his radiographic polaroids, for example, turns out to be particularly disturbing when
one realizes that its subject matter is actually blown-up cancer cells.
This contradiction between our feelings and knowledge is eventually
overpowered by a gradual rise towards an "unrepresentable" infinity.
This sublime strategy seems to fit Wyckoff perfectly: the excess in
representation (the repetitive and obsessive artistic display of similar
elements) is caused paradoxically by the necessity to find a means of
representing the excess (the microscopic world).
http://www.studio-visit.com/December1999/slides.html [website]
jwyckoff@hotmail.com [e-mail]
