Science fact or fiction

Two artists intersect in Summer Solos at the Contemporary

One day we may witness wealthy tourists jetting into outer space on adventure vacations, but it seems a constant of human experience that the closer science brings us to the heart of things, the more we recognize the limitations to our knowledge. Will a visit to Mars quench some insatiable longing to know, or only remind celestial tourists that they are mere dust specks in the solar system?

Prema Murthy and Michael Oliveri’s work at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center operates from just such a contradiction. In Oliveri’s video projections of endlessly curling ocean waves and Murthy’s prints of a vast video game universe, the artists show how we are drawn to humbling contemplations of the infinite.

These two conceptually kindred spirits featured in the second of the Contemporary’s Summer Solos shows both acknowledge the human desire to look into the vast, black void of the universe and the occasionally cliched and conventional ways we “intersect” with that great unknown.

Oliveri’s epic, multifaceted installation Fast Food, Hydrocarbons and Waves in Outer Space combines wide-eyed wonder at the universe’s power, with a jokey look at human attempts to understand it.

Comedy and awe collide in “NASA Nourishment,” Oliveri’s kooky installation featuring a mock-laboratory where tomato seeds become plants using hydroponic growing techniques. Though it’s high tech as all get out, Oliveri’s futuristic nursery marries a form of novelty and science that can resemble the goofiest, most primitive experiments with the natural world like sea monkeys and ant farms.

The odd mix of research and monkeying around is echoed in the look of Oliveri’s lab, indebted as much to movie set design as it is to science. The walls are draped in shiny silver Mylar (a la Warhol’s Factory) and the various hydroponics apparatuses emit a white noise hum, making the whole growingscape look like something future-tripping designer Pierre Cardin might have dreamed up in the ’60s.

Oliveri seems to marvel at the technology that allows plants to grow quickly, and in water instead of soil, but the work can inspire more cynical thoughts as well, of whether fast growing is better than the natural world order that forces human beings to measure time on its clock. And the growth of these plants in water with nary a trace of soil offers further commentary on the increasingly artificial processes involved in giving life.

If “NASA Nourishment” can be a disquieting meditation on what science can achieve, then Oliveri’s video projections of ocean waves render awe at the wonders of the natural world. Oliveri plays with color, rendering his waves in intense test-pattern colors to enhance their Liquid Sky psychedelic effect, reminiscent of the vintage wave-worship in Bruce Brown’s 1960s Surf Crazy cinema.

Alongside his videos of killer tubeage, Oliveri presents four digital prints called “Strategies in Waiting” that feature surfers bobbing in the middle of an infinite, calm ocean, waiting for the perfect swell. Unlike the NASA tomato plants grown on a demanding human time frame, these surfers looking out expectantly into nothingness assure us that the waves still punch their own clock.

Though both artists can veer into obscure and mystifying directions, Oliveri’s surfing and Murthy’s video game imagery offer the most satisfying connection between their work. The surfers and the gamers Oliveri and Murthy reference share similar traits: Both are typically male, both encounter mortality (though in video games, only virtual death) and both engage in all consuming, time-erasing pursuits.

The video games and science fiction films that Murthy references in her techno-gothic inject prints create a hypothetical, technologically determined vision of the future. The hyperglossy prints have a sheen suggesting both infinite space and the reflective glaze of the television or computer screen. Against those slick, black backgrounds Murthy creates outlines of mountain ranges, moons, planets and virtual rooms. The sketches serve as set pieces for the actions of headless, abstracted humanoid bodies, floating in space assuming postures of pain or ecstasy.

Murthy’s work has the unsavory look of concert T-shirts or black light posters and other totems of teenage rebellion. And there is something comparably death-tripping and dark about these mutated figures floating in a black void, assaulted by rays and beams. Though her human figures can morph between the robotic and the floating figures on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, the vision of the future they offer seems centered not on religious ecstasy, but on perpetual conflict. Murthy’s artworks not only resemble video game aesthetics, their artificial universes mimic the sensations of the games themselves — their solitude and the way they suck time and space into an enveloping black void.

In using the technological means at their disposal to express the limits and possibilities of science, Oliveri’s and Murthy’s artworks can be prescient and contemplative. But the artists seem so fully invested in the cool features of technology — from Murthy’s computer imaging to Oliveri’s hydroponics and color-manipulated video waves — they can also become lost within it, like scientists who never leave the lab. Or the video game players who can’t put down the joystick. Or surfers who want to catch just one more wave.

felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com