A Gorgeous New Petri Dish Painting For Every Day Of 2013
Klari Reis’s artworks are tiny--but not too tiny!
The humble Petri dish has played host to countless scientific marvels over the years. In many cases, all the action transpired on a microscopic scale. Thankfully for us, Klari Reis’s experiments are visible to the naked eye.
The San Francisco–based artist is currently in month three of "The Daily Dish 2013," a project that has her painting one Petri dish every day for the entire calendar year. The tiny plexiglass canvasses afford Reis more creative freedom than you might expect--while all the entries are vaguely biological, they cover a range of colors, textures, and forms.
"Prince," from February 2, looks like a delicate violet flower, or maybe a scrap of one of his outfits from the Purple Rain era pressed for preservation. "Silver Dollar Tan" from later that month looks like a colorized close-up of a lunar crater. "Disproportionate Pizza from the Unknown," January 19, is like a flat, concentric version of one of those bottles of colored sand you’d carefully layer when you were a kid.
For such miniature works, they pack a surprising visual punch. But then, this is hardly Reis’s first encounter with the medium. Back in 2009, the artist made the same dish-a-day resolution--you can see all 365 of those dishes here--and other of her works have included dozens of carefully arranged Petri paintings. They’re not really science, but for us right-brain creative types, they might as well be.
