Microbial Worlds Extra Credit

  1. I was drawn to Deceptive Beauty by Ree Nancarrow because of the overall color scheme: having the warm and cool colors together to provide contrast makes a piece stand out more to me because the piece seems to pop. There are a lot of little details that stand out more as I looked closer at the piece. Nancarrow executed the methane theme very well because without reading the artists’ statement, I would have had no idea what the piece was representing. I think leaving the audience to guess what the theme of the artwork contributes to the artists’ message. Nancarrow successfully conveyed the meaning in the piece because Nancarrow mentioned the production of methane bubbles being produced in frozen lakes.
  2. The Prokaryotes by Mariah Henderson and and Eric Henderson embodies the idea of prokaryotic evolutionary relationships since Bacteria and Archaea domains represent prokaryotes, which is considered to be the more diverse than eukaryotes. I was drawn to this piece because of its simplicity, yet the concept that it represents is far from being simple.
  3. The concept of the human microbiome is exemplified in Specimen by Margo Klass. We recently went over some of the basics of the human microbiome and touched on the mouth because of what we would be doing in Lab 10. This art piece relates to this concept because it is a prime example of the damage that microbes can do if we do not take care of our body. In the artists’ statement, Klass briefly mentions how there are some bacteria that can thrive when sugars are present and cause tooth decay/damage, and in lecture we went into more detail about how harmful microbes can be to teeth, such as plaque build-up.
  4. If I were an artist working in this show, I would probably make a piece of art exploring the concept of viruses because viruses are very prevalent in today’s society between increasing news coverage about disease outbreaks or the fact that there are more viruses that are mutating and starting to become resistant to treatment. I probably would have created an abstract painting focusing on the structure of a particular disease and kind of showing the impact that it has on people in terms of the symptoms that it causes.