When Lothar Schmitz, a research physicist at UCLA, enters the studio, he doesn’t escape his day job. Rather, Schmitz’s art embraces a panoply of sciences, from microbiology to chemistry to environmental science. The Cologne-born installationist has made his mark locally with detailed topographical miniatures, rather like hypernaturalistic model-train landscapes, in which certain clumps of vegetation are enclosed in Plexiglas bubbles, as if being subjected to targeted experimentation — or, conversely, protected from atmospheric perversion. But this selection of mostly recent works ranges far wider in its media, images and realms of investigation, and more often than not engages actual physical/biochemical material — everything from tanks and fluids to video images of protozoa to salt — in the mix. Unlike so much ecological art, Schmitz’s (increasingly) elaborate displays seem, if anything, to glamorize the taming or even undermining of natural conditions. In fact, they embody a peculiar ambivalence born of dystopian revelation: Nature’s already so shot to hell, only our intervention can save it. The question, of course, is whether nature “wants” to be saved like this. In this way, Schmitz, ever the scientist, cautions against the excesses of environmentalist romanticism as much as he does against heedless exploitation of resources. To save nature, he urges, know nature... More >>>