A new exhibit on display at the Center of Excellence Building highlights the artistic elements of scientific research at Binghamton University.

The seventh-annual Art of Science competition received 56 entries, says Martha Terry, creative services manager in the Office of Research Advancement and coordinator of the contest. She selected 11 images for the new show, which will remain in the COE Atrium through early 2024.

“I was impressed once again with the range of entries we saw in this year’s competition,” Terry says. “Researchers in the life sciences continue to capture such stunning images with microscopes, and we also have a number of extremely talented photographers on campus.”

Members of the campus community submitted images in two categories: The World Around Us, in which the subject is visible to the naked eye; and Visualizing the Unseen, captured with the use of optics that extend beyond what the eye can see.

The top prize, Best in Show and First Place in The World Around Us, went to Jessica Fridrich, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering. Her entry, titled “Celestial Cotton Candy,” featured violent weather in the Southwest. “Monsoons can be dangerous and destructive as well as awe inspiring and outright beautiful,” she wrote in her entry. “I am a researcher. My job is to look for new problems and open people’s eyes. My photography does the same as I search for new compositions and ways to portray remote places.”

Second Place in that category went to Pavel Masek, assistant professor of biological sciences, for an image he captured with his cell phone at home. The striking photograph shows two fruit flies harvesting nectar from a bee that was killed by a spider.

Third Place honors went to master’s student Olivia Lopez for an image titled “A Queen is Born.” “A queen bee has found her first drone to mate with on her nuptial flight,” she wrote in her entry. “A rare sight to see outside of a human-kept hive, this pair was on a twig on the ground of the campus Nature Preserve main trail, and safely relocated.”

Ling Wang, a lecturer in biomedical engineering, took home top prize in the Visualizing the Unseen category for an image and 3D rendering of breast cancer cells.
Second Place went to an image titled “Hippocampus Blues” submitted by Meredith Gamble, a doctoral candidate in psychology. Third Place went to “Mr. Wrinkle’s Sad Smile,” entered by Ash Spina, a doctoral candidate in biomedical engineering.

This year’s judges were Evan Henderson, creative marketing specialist, Harpur College of Arts and Sciences; Jeffrey Mativetsky, associate professor of physics, applied physics and astronomy and director of the Materials Science and Engineering Program; Blessin McFarlane, an English major and a member of the Class of 2023; and Meera Sampath, associate dean of research, Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science. They evaluated entries based on artistic merit as well as scientific significance.

Each of them presented a Judge’s Choice selection. Those honors went to “Levitating Gel Donut,” entered by Kirsten Krick, a graduate student in biomedical engineering; “Dermal Nebula,” also entered by Spina; “Fruit Flies Stealing Nectar from a Killed Bee,” submitted by Masek; and “Celestial Cotton Candy,” entered by Fridrich.

The contest, sponsored by the Office of Research Advancement and the S3IP Center of Excellence, was part of Research Days festivities.

The contest, organized by the Office of Research Advancement, gives people an opportunity to share the beauty of science through photographs and images that describe some aspect of research captured visually.

“I’ve been so impressed by the quality and variety of the submissions to this contest,” says Martha Terry, creative services manager and coordinator of the competition. “It’s always interesting to see the entries as they come in. We have had stunning photos taken during people’s field work, but also amazing images from microscopes. If I had to pick a favorite from last year, it would be Pavel Masek’s Thermal Fly image.”

In 2020, there will be two categories:

• The World Around Us: images in which the subject is visible to the naked eye
• Visualizing the Unseen: images captured with the use of optics that extend beyond what the eye can see, such as microscopes and telescopes, or models of scientific phenomena or processes or interpretations of scientific information

Images will be evaluated based on scientific significance, originality and artistic and visual impact. This year’s judges are Jocelyn Bailey, account director at Idea Kraft; Steve Czarnecki, associate director of S3IP; Madhuri Govindaraju, UI designer/developer in University Communications and Marketing; undergraduate Jake Kerr; Claire Kovacs, curator of collections and exhibitions for the Binghamton University Art Museum; and Alexsa Silva, director of instruction and outreach in the Chemistry Department.

This year’s top prize will be a new iPad.

Entries, due Feb. 24, must have been created in 2017 or later in connection with research at Binghamton University. Winners will be announced at a reception during Research Days in April. For entry guidelines and more details, visit https://research.binghamton.edu/events/researchdays/artofscience.php.

Peter Farquharson, a junior majoring in art history, saw more than 300 murals during his two weeks in Buenos Aries and Quito. While he originally intended to major in political science, he maintains his interest in politics through finding political themes in artforms like muralism.

He planned the trip to South America on his own, including reaching out to artists and mapping out the neighborhoods to view the murals, says Pamela Smart, associate professor of art history.

Some days, he met artists and they provided a direct explanation of the message behind their own murals.

“Other days it was just people who live in the area,” Farquharson says. “Because that’s an important factor to get in the research. They’re the audience to some extent.”

He sought to compare modern murals to those from several previous decades to see just how artists, their work and the messages they want to convey have changed.

“I’m also finding that the means of visual representation, in some ways, are exactly the same,” he says. “There’s a sense that artists are evoking the past of the medium, but in about the other half of the cases, it’s ‘No, we want to do something completely different.’”

Farquharson categorized the murals under two complex umbrellas: art as a political and social statement, and art as a form of creative self-expression. Many of the murals he documented showcase vibrant colors, sharp contrasts between light and dark as well as powerful outlines.

The contrast between the social and political murals guided his trips between the two countries. Argentina’s murals centered more on the political, especially the last 100 years and the legacy of the Peróns, the massively influential first family of Argentina during the late 1940s and 1950s. The murals he studied in Ecuador, meanwhile, focused more on the cultural identity of the country, centering on the recognition of indigenous peoples and defining the country’s pre-colonial legacy.

Farquharson’s language skills came in handy during the trip; he said he made it a point to converse with artists in Spanish whenever possible. On campus, the Long Island native acts as an English language conversation partner. He is also a teaching assistant for an inter-disciplinary course titled Materials Matter.

Smart said Farquharson was her first choice to run the student discussion sections and assist in teaching the course.

“He stood out in the class last semester, such that he was the person I thought would make a great undergraduate TA,” Smart says. “There are several elements there. One was the quality of his work, his work ethic… and the degree of his interest and engagement.”

Farquharson maintained that interest even when he was forced to rearrange his plans due to safety concerns while traveling for this research with the Summer Scholars and Artists program.

“If you have an idea and there’s something you want to do, there isn’t a way that you can’t manage,” Farquharson says. “There’s enough resources on campus and people who want you to succeed, there’s no reason you can’t take your own idea and make it a reality.”

Jin, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, submitted an image called “Plates” that featured petri dishes of different species of fungi. She and her colleagues are exploring whether fungi could be used as a self-healing agent to promote calcium mineral precipitation to fill the cracks in concrete.

The image took first place in “The World Around Us,” a category featuring subjects visible to the naked eye, and was named Best in Show as well.

Students, faculty and staff also competed in two other categories: “Visualizing the Unseen,” images captured with the use of optics that extend beyond what the eye can see, such as microscopes and telescopes; and “Imagining Science,” images that depict objects too small to be visualized directly, models of scientific phenomena or processes or interpretations of scientific information.

The second-annual competition was coordinated by Martha Terry, creative services manager in the Office of Research Advancement. Winners were announced during Binghamton Research Days.

Second- and third-place recognition in “The World Around Us” also went to faculty members: Chengbin Deng, assistant professor of geography, took second with “Nighttime Binghamton University Campus,” while Jessica Fridrich, professor of electrical and computer engineering, took third place with “Eclipse.”

In “Imagining science,” first place went to Alex J. Feingold, professor of mathematical sciences, for “Amzakoe Genus 3 Triple Link,” while Sara Grills took both second and third place for stratigraphy images related to her work for the Public Archaeology Facility, where she is a project manager.

“Visualizing the Unseen,” meanwhile, was dominated by an undergraduate who designed his own major. First- and second-place honors went to Zachariah P. Liebmann, who entered images he took while studying organic matter and how it presents itself under ultraviolet light.

Third place in that category went to graduate student Tong Yang and her mentor, Jeffrey Mativetsky, assistant professor of physics. Their image, “Alien Tunnels,” was captured with an optical microscope and featured crystals formed by depositing and drying an “ink” composed of organic semiconducting molecules dissolved in a solvent.

This year’s judges were Surinder Kahai, associate professor, School of Management; Blazo Kovacevic, assistant professor of art and design; Matt Mendelsohn ’85, photojournalist, portrait photographer and writer; Kevin E. Paredes ’18, photography editor, Pipe Dream; Pamela Smart, associate professor of art history/anthropology; and Ewelina Zajac-Holdrege, founder and creative director, Idea Kraft.

See a slideshow featuring all of this year’s entries online at https://youtu.be/vQIx8bTDkiI.

Mclauchlin, a rising senior at Binghamton University, grabbed the attention of Jessica Hua, an assistant professor of biological sciences, not only with his scientific background but also with his art portfolio.

With guidance from Hua, Mclauchlin created an interactive art exhibit with 20 pieces ranging from a painting of tadpoles to a papier-mâché organism. The project explored art’s influence on perception of research.

“It was a combination of two studies actually,” says Mclauchlin, an environmental studies and graphic design major. “We not only tested for perception of research, but also for comprehension and retention of information in the exhibit.”

Perception of research was measured by a pre-quiz and follow-up quiz. In total there were around 80 participants from both scientific and non-scientific backgrounds. Participants without scientific backgrounds had a 20 percent increase in research interest after attending the exhibit, and scientifically inclined participants had a 10 percent increase.

On the other hand, Hua’s ecology students experienced no change in perception of scientific research. The students even decreased in retention of information in a follow-up quiz one week later. Most students retained information better after reading scientific abstracts instead.

“This suggests that art can facilitate scientific appreciation and is most influential for individuals with non-scientific backgrounds,” Mclauchlin says. “I can see this information being used for science museums, exhibits or by scientists who want to communicate their research to the public.”

Mclauchlin aims to create a larger, more cohesive exhibit in the future, with more diversified participants in the study. For the learning and retention aspect of the exhibit, he plans to administer more follow-up quizzes to the ecology classes, in order to analyze memory at varying times of the day and amounts of time after the exhibit.

Understanding the influence of different mediums could be important for the future of science communication, especially in a time where there is a divide between the scientific and non-scientific world.

Vanessa Wuerthner, a doctoral student in Hua’s lab, says Mclauchlin brings something to the lab that no other student does: He turns research from the lab into art. “Ben puts in an immense amount of time and effort in making art pieces that he then brings together at art shows that are open to the public,” she says. “All of his artistic efforts allow the lab to really bridge the gap between the science community and the local community.”

Mclauchlin received a Summer Scholars and Artists fellowship to conduct research on marine debris and plastics in Binghamton this summer. He spends his time outside of the lab volunteering in the Nature Preserve, attending Ballroom Dance Club and participating in the Hinman Production Company, a student-run theater group.

Mclauchlin says he tries to balance his workload each semester with half science courses and half art courses.

Hua says she was impressed by Mclauchlin’s range of skills. “Ben is very creative, and his willingness to help others makes him an asset to the lab,” Hua says. “It could be 1 a.m., and he’ll be the first person to offer help to another student in the lab.”

In our candy-colored digital world, there’s no time for rust. Gadgets from five years ago are worthless to a “new-every-two” culture. And a man working long hours alone in a garage is presumed to harbor grand ambitions of becoming a start-up millionaire.

But on Robinson Street in Binghamton, you can pick up a distinctly analog signal. It emanates from the cramped studio of sculptor Ronald Gonzalez, a Binghamton University faculty member who transforms the detritus of the last century into burned and blackened figures that speak to the 21st century’s values, politics and ideas of beauty.

Step inside, and you’ll see a workbench that will never witness the birth of a shiny, high-tech gizmo. It’s dotted with drips of wax and home to ancient coffee cans bristling with tiny paintbrushes. The jumble of not-yet-art objects stacked against the walls includes a red typewriter, bicycle seats, a deer skull, a rotary phone, broken guitars, a doll-sized bathtub and hopelessly scratched 45s. Standing guard among this trove are completed works, figures with names like “Stitch,” “Bug” and “Stir.”

A slight, soft-spoken man in a black T-shirt, dark jeans and gray sneakers, Gonzalez is perhaps more at home among these curiosities than anywhere else. “I’ve got a great eye for decay,” he says, scanning his treasures. “The more dilapidated something is, the more attracted I am to it.”

Only in Binghamton

Gonzalez, a prolific sculptor and recipient of the 2013 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, has had solo exhibitions at world-class museums such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park near Boston. He has mounted shows at the Spoleto Festival, the Purchase Biennial and in places as far away as Peru and Germany. But his roots bind him to Binghamton, where Gonzalez grew up a bit of a street kid in the 1950s and ’60s.

His mother was religious; his father just the opposite. He was an altar boy who knew how to shoplift. In fact, Gonzalez says, the major dichotomies in his life can all be traced back to his childhood. Contrasts of sex and guilt, rich and poor, God and atheist, imagination and reality, life and death shaped his emotional and psychological outlook.

“I am definitely a TV and telephone kid from the 1950s,” he says. “I am a product of post-World War II existential Binghamton and the Atomic Age.”

Gonzalez was awakened to art through religious statuary stored in the basement of the local church, where he would pretend to be a sculptor. He was intrigued by the idea that someone could use his imagination to manipulate the human form.

Gonzalez went to the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City with his mother when he was 12. He got lost and recalls wandering through the exhibits until he came to Michelangelo’s Pietà, which was there on loan from the Vatican. Gonzalez couldn’t see over the people crowding around it, but remembers feeling “a sense of reverence and awe” among the onlookers.

That moment and one other, a few years later, sparked something inside Gonzalez. When he was in his teens, he saw pictures of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker. His first thought was of the sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which sometimes featured the main character striking that classic pose. But Gonzalez’s second thought (in a moment of boredom) was to look for art books at the library.

He managed to locate a book about Rodin and another about Vincent van Gogh. “I became fascinated with the presence and power of the swirling sea of figures in Rodin’s The Gates of Hell,” Gonzalez says. “I went out and bought a bag of clay that day. I brought it into my bedroom and started making things. I’ve never really stopped.”

It was the late 1960s, but the art books he remembers finding in the public library highlighted figurative sculpture from the 1940s and ’50s. He learned about French sculptor Germaine Richier, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso, artists often concerned with themes of isolation and anxiety. “There was enough there to get my mind going,” Gonzalez says, a slight smile crossing his lips.

In the mid-1970s, he met Ed Wilson, who taught sculpture at Binghamton University. Gonzalez eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in art from Binghamton, where he returned in 1999 as a faculty member. Today, he says, he sometimes feels “good vibrations” while critiquing student work in his office, which used to be Wilson’s. Though Gonzalez came late to teaching, he values the one-on-one contact with students. “I help them develop a personal language in sculpture,” he says. “I’m trying to turn them into themselves.”

Gonzalez says his own feeling for being an artist and making things, which began as a kid, still lives deep inside him. “It’s like I’m 60 going on 6 in some way,” he says. “That same thud of an idea and impulse I had as a child is something I never let go of. It’s still there, and I’m still making things from what I can find in my immediate environment.”

He has adapted to that environment, especially the wintry grayness of the upstate valley that has been his home all these years. “Geographic location defines identity,” he says. “My work is saturated with time and the moments of my life. I remember the black-and-white Twilight Zone qualities of the Binghamton diners, streets and train station growing up. Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz was right when she said there is no place like home. But home sickness is not something you get just when you miss home. It is also something you get because you never left.”

Don’t confuse Gonzalez’s strong roots with provincialism, though. He spent time last summer touring the museums and galleries of London and has made other pilgrimages abroad. “New perspectives are always healthy, even for a self-proclaimed homebody,” he says. “When you stay in one place your whole life, time and space take on a tremendous weight. There is no place like home — and no place like the rest of the world.”

The creative process

A new chapter in Gonzalez’s lifelong project on the personification of things might originate with something like an air filter from a car or a gas mask. He has a special fondness for objects that were designed to communicate and that are now useless. A telephone or speaker, for instance, could become the head of a new figure.

Gonzalez generally begins with a welded metal armature, almost a template, with legs and arms. He wires objects onto this base, starting with the item or items that will form the “head.” “From there, I try to create a persona, an identity for the figure,” he says.

He fills journals with possible titles for sculptures, and so sometimes he has a name in mind right from the start. “Stitch” features footballs with the stitching as a scar; several change purses were transformed into a piece called “Tabernacle,” suggesting an internalized sacred space.

Often the source material can be identified immediately, but other figures challenge the casual observer to look more carefully. The head of a piece titled “Stir” was made from stirrups you’d use to ride a horse, but they’re obscured by the sculpture’s insect-like quality. Gonzalez wants the objects to be recognizable if you look at them long enough.

At this point in the process, Gonzalez critiques the figure. Some will be thrown away. The ones he likes will be coated with paint, metal filings and carbon from a settling tank. Next, he scuffs the figure with steel wool and coats it with beeswax. For a final touch, he sets fire to the piece in a small courtyard next to his studio. That burns off the extra wax.

“I like the idea of corrosion because of its expressive power,” he says. “Destroying things is part of making things. It’s part of the process. A lot of things fall away.”

Sculpture is a day-in, day-out process for Gonzalez, who estimates that he has produced hundreds and hundreds of figures during the past five years.

While he’s in the studio, he keeps a schedule that bears more than a little resemblance to his father’s day when he was cutting soles for shoes at an Endicott Johnson Corp. factory. “I get up in the morning and come to work, take a break, come back, work,” he says. “At 5, I usually go home, have half a glass of wine and eat something and go to bed early. I think that assembly-line mentality is something I developed early in life. There are days when I think of my studio as a figure factory.”

Gonzalez isn’t a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. He says he doesn’t even like jokes. But in the studio, this introvert finds a sense of balance, one that energizes him. “There have been times in my life when things were horrible,” he says, “and I could come to my studio and be resurrected through my work.”

Forging ahead

His time in that studio, which he likens to a part of his body, may be coming to a close. The property, owned by Gonzalez’s elderly mother, recently went up for sale, and he has begun to consider losing the place that has informed the spirit of his work for nearly four decades.

This spring, he plans to create a new work space at his home. He’s carving out room in an outbuilding, tucked into the lush, beautifully landscaped yard where his old dog likes to play. Gonzalez expects the studio move to be a difficult transition, but he has grown accustomed to working through challenges.

There are the challenges common to all sculptors: where to store the work that’s not on display, how to transcend small studio spaces, buying a pickup truck that’s big enough to haul pieces to shows.

And there are the challenges more particularly his own: the paucity of Atomic Age objects available at flea markets and garage sales these days, chief among them. Younger generations often don’t value older things, he says, and at the same time eBay has given people a different way to make money on antiques.

“I’ve done things the hardest way possible,” Gonzalez says. “I work by myself. I make everything by hand. I’ve never been very strategic.”

Art carries a huge risk, he notes. It’s not just a lack of money or a traditional career trajectory. It’s hard to live through rejection. “Artists work out of a need for self-expression, not a need for recognition,” he says, possibly echoing conversations he has had with himself over the years.

Only a small sliver of artists achieve fame or even real recognition, Gonzalez says. And even those with tremendous ability may not get the attention of the art world. He draws a comparison that few artists would be likely to make: Artists toiling in obscurity are like Jimmy Bivens, a talented heavyweight boxer who never managed to get a title fight.

Gonzalez sees 21st-century digital culture as a colorful, hypnotic place in which a confusing visual experience is presented as reality. “It’s a kind of mummified world now,” he says. “There’s a loss there.”

He’s determined to keep sending out his unique analog distress signal and hopes his blackened minions will stand their ground against the electronic tidal wave. After all, he says,  “I am from the world of mud.”

A few days later, a gruff voice came over the phone from San Francisco: “How can I help?” It was Conner, a counter-cultural artist with connections to Hippies, Beatniks, Punks and other culture movements. A man so uncomfortable with popularity that he changed media whenever he felt he was too hot a commodity.

Conner had a reputation for destroying dissertations and research projects. And now he was on the phone with Hatch, then a Princeton University doctoral candidate.

Hatch is an art historian with no art on the walls of his Binghamton University office, but his voice just oozes sincerity. And within days, CDs began to arrive: newspaper clippings of the high school art contest Conner won; notes on old film projects made of found film; letters to colleagues on the San Francisco art scene. It was gold to an art historian writing a book.

Treasures kept coming. The University of California at Berkeley even allowed Hatch into its Conner archives, which were off-limits to the public.

The result was “Looking for Bruce Conner,” a 2012 book that studies Conner’s work in depth, and places it in context of the San Francisco art scene as an influential form of anti-pop art far away from Warhol-dominated New York. Conner, who died in 2008, produced work ranging from assemblages and installations to compilations of found film, sculpture, even art created from ink blots.

“I liked the fact that this was someone who worked outside the perceived center — New York,” Hatch says. “I’m from Detroit, so I like underdogs in general.”

Conner’s media was as much a part of his message as its content, Hatch says. Discarded film, clipped images, bits and bobs of what was around him — they were a comment on an overly commodified world.

“He shows how Conner’s assemblages, with their grotesquery, their evocation of the cruel eroticism and violence of daily life, were rooted in Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty and its aspiration to give ‘the heart and the senses that kind of concrete bite which all true sensation requires,’” art critic Barry Schwabsky writes in The Nation.

They were also comments on his personal state of mind, including images of dead celebrities — Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy, among others — and his own fear of being pinned down, Hatch says.

So what’s next for Hatch? After 11 years studying Conner, he’ll broaden his perspective, perhaps to San Francisco’s art scene in the 1950s and ’60s. Like Conner, he won’t be pinned down by his past work: “The objects should direct me,” he says. “Where people go wrong in this industry is they take a theory and apply it to X.”

Her monograph The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port, published in 2009 by the University of Washington Press, explores how maritime trade saturated Mocha, a major player in Yemen’s coffee trade.

Research has carried the globe-trotting researcher from Yemeni villages that “look like they’re falling off” hillsides to Dutch and British libraries that house detailed records of European trade ventures. “I use a lot of different sources,” says Um, who has been praised for her innovative merging of archival and architectural materials to recount the glory days of a city whose commercial center now lies mostly in ruins.

She is returning to those sources for her latest research into commercial exchange and merchant tribute in Yemen from 1600 to 1750. Essentially, local rulers expected gifts before granting trade privileges. “Gift exchange was much more than a simple exercise of good manners or polite gestures,” Um writes. “Rather gifts were serious and necessary aspects of merchant protocol.”

Um says that, although other scholars have acknowledged the importance of gift-giving, “they often cast this preoccupation … as examples of the insatiable appetite that fickle oriental despots had for trinkets.” She, however, has seen the opposite. “I’ve been intrigued by how totally prosaic most of the gifts were,” Um says, listing trade items such as firearms, textiles and porcelains.

Although her current research focuses on the Dutch and British East India Companies, Um stresses the Europeans “were minor players in Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade whose importance has been blown out of proportion.” They were, however, better record keepers, carefully documenting each gift given.