November 20, 2002

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'Imaging/Imagining'
Through Dec. 7, Kala Art Institute

CAROL SELTER IS one of four local artists in "Imaging/Imagining." Her piece, Transformation of Matter and Energy, sounds like an essay on New Age consciousness, but it's actually a study of worms. She placed the worms on her flatbed scanner, gave them a branch to munch on, and scanned at regular intervals. The results are a little spooky; the worms stand out in bright white, the leaves are brilliant green, and the background is deep black. Besides the scans' incredible colors, their time-lapse nature also reveals interesting patterns of animal behavior that might otherwise go unnoticed. Her work is at the "imaging" end of the show. Somewhere in the middle, between "imaging" and "imagining," are Kate Farrall's huge photograms (photographic prints made without a camera) of fantastically supersaturated blue, red, and turquoise blobs swimming through a velvety black void. The pictures look as if they could have come from National Geographic or some other slick pop-sci mag, but they weren't taken through a microscope in a biology lab. Rather, they are the results of Farrall's darkroom noodling with color photo paper and ordinary household objects. Also featured in the show are Cheryl Calleri's lovely and enigmatic mixed-media images of human neurons and several drawings by San Francisco Police Department artist Amy Nelder. One of very few full-time forensic artists in the country, Nelder interviews crime-scene witnesses and reconstructs the suspects' appearances based on verbal descriptions. So she's kind of a portrait artist, but one who specializes in the faces of people she's never seen. One of her drawings is an age progression (amazingly executed without the aid of a computer) that predicts what a man in a 30-year-old mug shot would look like today. Tues.-Fri., noon-5:30 p.m.; Sat., noon-4:30 p.m.; and by appointment, 1060 Heinz, Berk. (510) 549-2977. (Lindsey Westbrook)