Unfathomable Logic by Katherine Sherwood

If art and science mix, then the field of anatomy has long been a thick burgoo. For centuries, the anatomist relied on the artist to record the dry details of the human body, inside and out. There was no other way to do it save through pencil, pen, and brush. But photography, X-rays, CAT scans, and newer imaging technologies have replaced the artist in helping scientists understand the human form. Artists haven?t given up, however; they?ve moved on.

One result is ?Visionary Anatomies?, an exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. It includes paintings, prints, collages, and other works by 11 artists who use anatomical and medical concepts to illustrate their own ideas. For these artists, the body is often just a jumping-off point. Many of the works begin with something technical ? an old X-ray, perhaps, or an angiogram ? but become something else, often a very personal statement, said the exhibition?s curator, J.D. Talasek, the director of the academy?s office of exhibitions and cultural programmes.

?Art doesn?t require you to be completely rational and logical,? Talasek said. ?It allows you to be personal and see how these technologies affect you.? A case in point is Unfathomable Logic, a large mixed-media canvas by Katherine Sherwood, a San Francisco artist. It combines a lithograph of an angiogram taken after a stroke with paint marks that echo symbols from a 17th-century sorcerer?s handbook.

The effect is made more powerful when you know that the angiogram shows the blood vessels in Sherwood?s own brain. In Figure 2055, an oil with gold leaf by Tatiana Garmendia of Seattle, it?s not the medical element that is personal, but what is added to it.

The painting resembles an x-ray of a human skeleton. But the added gold leaf is a symbol of the Santeria religion that Garmendia, a native of Cuba, was raised in. ?It alludes to the religious icons she grew up with,? Talasek said.

Not all the works are so personal. Some play tricks with the observer, Talasek said. Panorama Paris, a pair of photographs by a Berlin photographer, Stefanie Buerkle, juxtaposes an image of an anatomical model of a man in a room full of other creatures at the National Museum of Natural History with one of a terminal at Charles de Gaulle airport.

At first glance, Blot Out the Sun No. 1, paired inkjet prints on paper with wax and encaustic by Mike and Doug Starn, Brooklyn, artists, looks like two enlarged images of capillaries or nerve cells, branching off to nothingness in a very treelike way. In fact, both images are of trees.

Henry Fountain / NYTNS