When art professor Thomas Brennan walks into Williams Hall, he can cast an upward glance at the building’s ornate terra cotta façade. “The Williams Science Hall” spelled out in an arc, a trio of medallions honoring eminent nineteenth-century men of science — naturalist Jean Louis Rodolphe Aggassiz, inventor Samuel F.B. Morse and physicist Joseph Henry.
The sense that there’s some irony in having an art department housed in the erstwhile science hall isn’t lost on Brennan, particularly given the focus of his recent work as an artist.
He laughs at the mention of it: “Yes, I love that.”
Step into Burlington City Arts gallery on Church Street for a firsthand look at the ways photographer Brennan has explored science and the natural world as the primary focus of his art across the past four years. The works on display in Brennan’s “Darkness From Light” are shadow images created without a camera and rooted in photography’s earliest origins, the discovery that when light interacts with a silver salt it creates a black image.
Brennan describes his work as “photogenic drawing,” the original term coined by Henry Fox Talbot in 1835 and later shortened to photography by his compatriot, John Herschel. “I like using that term for this work, because it establishes a historical place for the ideas,” Brennan says. “Many of the images in this room are about collection and display. They are very early 19th century. That’s when natural history museums begin to be created and have a place in the public imagination.”
Brennan stands in the BCA’s first floor gallery, where his shadow images of birds from various museum’s natural history collections are on display. We’re surrounded by quetzals and flamingoes, American bitterns and Arctic loons and superb lyrebirds. But there are no bright feathers, just pure form. Brennan calls shadows “the most perfect and least perfect records.”
Most of the images are immediately perceived as birds, particularly birds on museum display (the Victorian excess of a densely populated hummingbird tree is a particularly fine example). But some works veer toward abstraction depending on the vantage point from which Brennan has created his image. Flamingoes folded for storage in a Cornell University museum suggest an elegiac quality. A typology of hummingbirds seems to echo Japanese calligraphy.
This latest direction in Brennan’s work traces to a project he gave to a class of first-year photography students in 2010 that involved creating shadow images without a camera. To also explore the nature of portraits and invest the class more deeply in the work, Brennan had the students clip locks of their own hair and use them to create their own shadow images.
“That very same week I started making my own pieces in this way,” Brennan recalls. “It just sort of catalyzed.” Apple blossoms, Daddy longlegs, and bird nests soon drew the photographer’s attention. A piece from that earlier work is on display with “Ninety Nests,” a large grid of distinct images of bird nests that Brennan collected in the woods and marshes around his Hinesburg home.
In the current exhibit, “Ninety Nests” is the outlier in a room that branches from Brennan’s initial exploration of bird images to consider science visualized on both smaller and larger scales. Molecular to galactic, Brennan casts shadows of moments in scientific history from man’s grappling with the order of the solar system to Dorothy Hodgkins’ electron density map of penicillin to early models of DNA.
Brennan walks across the gallery to discuss “Orrery of 8 Planets,” one of his favorite images in the exhibit. He notes that the model of the solar system photographed was created in 1861, just two years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. “I think of the whole struggle to reconcile science and religion and the delight that this would have given to a privileged audience in Victorian England,” Brennan says. “Part of that delight would be to be reassured there is a design and that design is along the lines of a clockwork, something that they understood, something that was a part of their world.”
Gallery tour and interview complete, Brennan and I walk back up College Street to campus. Nearing the corner on Willard, we pass a dead crow, wings splayed, lying next to the sidewalk. We both briefly slow and can’t help but laugh at the sight, strangely familiar at that moment.
“A few years ago, I probably would have picked that up and taken it home,” Brennan says.
But departed birds are in his past. On the horizon this summer, Brennan travels to New York University where he’ll be a visiting artist and explore creating shadow images of two-dimensional materials such as ancient maps, and math and physics schemata archived in NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
Tom Brennan’s “Darkness From Light” is on display at Burlington City Arts through June 20.