sLowlife plant/art exhibit presented at SoFA Gallery

Five planters sit in one corner. Each planter contains the same plant at various stages of its growth. On the wall behind the plants are a collection of shelf fungi. In the adjacent corner, a plant sits inside a terrarium on top of a laboratory bench.\nBut this is not one of IU's research laboratories. It is one of the current exhibits on display at the School of Fine Arts Gallery.\nThe exhibit, titled sLowlife, is a collaboration between IU plant biologist Roger Hangarter and artist Dennis DeHart. The multimedia exhibit features time-lapse video captured in Hangarter's laboratory, photographic prints and live plants.\n"I hope people get a new appreciation for plants as a dynamic part of our environment," Hangarter said. "I wanted it to be mostly about plants because they are necessary for all life on earth. They create our oxygen and provide all our food." \nHangarter said he feels people do not notice plants; they just take them for granted. "Perhaps this exhibit will change their view of their surroundings," he said.\nDeHart said while there is some intersection, his goal differs from Hangarter's.\n"Educating people about the natural world and the environment is important," DeHart said. "But for me, there is also creating an aesthetic experience for the viewer and creating a space for contemplation and reflection. And also having an interesting visual experience. I am particularly interested in the collaboration, kind of cross-disciplinary knowledge, and what can be accomplished."\nDeHart said the collaboration began last year when he was a visiting faculty member in the fine arts department. \n"Roger approached the chair of the art department and she mentioned that Roger had this interesting stuff that he was doing, and we basically met over coffee and we hit it off and had a good rapport with each other," DeHart said.\nDana Sperry, associate director of the SoFA Gallery, said the gallery was interested when Hangarter and DeHart approached it with the project.\n"We thought that it was really exciting," he said.\nHangarter was trying to find other ways to get people connected to plants, Sperry said. \n"Getting people to see things another way is what artists do all the time," Hangarter said.\nSperry added that having many different types of media helps convey the message of the exhibit. \n"It is an advantage because it creates many points of entry, and appeals to many levels of sensibility," he said.\nThe centerpiece of the exhibit is "101 Tropisms," DeHart said.\nHangarter defined a tropism as "bending of a plant toward or away from some directional stimulus, in this case light."\nThe images for "101 Tropisms" were actually low-resolution web cam movies taken as data by one of the graduate students in Hangarter's laboratory, DeHart said. \nThe 101 movies that show the plants' movements were then looped and projected on the gallery wall, 96 movies at a time. \n"It represents science taking what looks like a bunch of abstract noise and finding pattern and order in it, which is what the data represents when it slips up on the screen," Hangarter said. \nThe interactive piece "Darwin's Experiment" actively challenges viewers' concept of plants as inanimate objects. The piece encourages people to mark the height of the plant on the glass of the terrarium and to then return at a later time to see how the plant has grown. \n"Opening night, the plant we had in there was moving a lot, so within five minutes people would notice that it moved," Hangarter said. "For many people, that's a real educational experience, because they've never seen or noticed the change in plants because they do it so slowly."\nThe sLowlife exhibit runs until Nov. 21. The SoFA Gallery is open 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. \n-- Contact staff writer Matt McNabb at mmcnabb@indiana.edu.