Science inspires art, new show

POLSON - If you had stopped by Polson's Sandpiper Art Gallery and Gift Shop last Wednesday afternoon, you never would have believed there was an opening reception slated to take place Friday evening. With bare walls and empty shelves, the gallery was cleaned out from head to toe last weekend because of the possible damage that Main Street construction could have caused to the fragile work.

On Thursday, the gallery resembled Santa's workshop on Christmas Eve as a small crew worked like fanatics to clean and set up the show, "Through the Lens and by the Hands," which opened Friday all the same.

"We didn't know exactly when the construction was going to happen," Mary Kelley, Sandpiper Gallery director, said. "We were told the machine that was going to do the digging would shake everything off the walls, so Jay [Cross, the show's curator,] started taking things down Saturday and Sunday. It was probably a good benefit, though. Things needed dusting and rearranging, and it all looked very nice on Friday night."

Cross, a Polson-based landscape and wildlife photographer and Sandpiper Gallery volunteer, brought together a rather unique group of five artists: himself, wildlife photographer Eugene Beckes, of St. Ignatius, Martin Mumma, of Polson, and his turned wood bowls and vessels, abstract photographer Donald Stein, a summer resident of Bigfork, and Lee Proctor, also of Bigfork, who works with blown and cast glass.

"This is a really interesting group of people," he said.

Originally from Ohio, Cross is now able to make a career out of what was once just a passionate hobby.

"We'd been coming to Glacier [National Park] for years," he said. "Any excuse to come, we'd take, but it was getting expensive to do that, so we moved."

Cross used to make a living with his electronic engineering and design background, working to write code and running tests for a small, "many hats" sort of company via the Internet until 2008.

"When things got difficult, I thought, OK, I can make lemonade from these lemons," he said. "Essentially, I was laid off. So, I started doing photography full time."

His website, www.Lumen-Perfectus.com, represents his ever-growing collection of fine art images from across the globe.

"We hope these images help promote a respect for the flora and animals and their environments, an appreciation of their beauty, and an interest in their preservation," he said in the site's "About" page.

The Sandpiper's selection contains some of his best images, which he also prints to perfection from his home studio.

"For me, it's all about quality," he said. "I use Photoshop strictly to process an image to make a print. If it takes that much work in Photoshop, I will [scrap] it and go back to shooting. What I really like is being out in the field, just being outdoors. The camera is sort of an excuse to do that."

While he prefers to be out hunting down the perfect light and capturing that decisive moment, Cross has had to accept the technology of his profession and use his computer savyness to make ends meet. He puts hours into photo restoration projects that test his skills to the fullest.

"It's very labor-intensive," he said. "These photographs have been stuffed in a desk, some are all torn up... Sometimes it's a struggle to match the tone of the image to what the original may have been."

Alongside Cross are Eugene Beckes's powerful images of nature.

"We do similar subjects," Cross said. "But the styles are enough different that you'd never mix them up."

Don Stein photographs cars in the macro. Appearing in his first professional show, Stein's background may surprise: He is a professor of neuroscience at Emory University in Atlanta. Stein studies brain repair, developing treatments for traumatic brain injury and stroke.

"We found that the progesterone developmental hormone cut mortality by 60 percent in the first two clinical trials," he said.

While Stein said he uses photography in his daily work as a scientist, it's very precision-oriented. Abstraction became his form of rebellion from this type of shooting.

"As a scientist, I have to make sure that every waking minute, every thing I say and do represents the facts. I don't want to come home at the end of the day and do that," he said. "I wanted to do something a little different."

Stein shot most of the images for this show at a summer car show in Bigfork. For him though, it's not about shooting cars, but capturing the essence of each delicate structure.

"It was an experiment," he said. "I was looking at the light coming off the cars... I wanted to not just capture a car, but find something that is the car's inner soul."

Photography allows Stein to deal with more emotion than he can in his everyday life as a scientist.

"It's so much more relaxing," he said. "I'm very curious to see the response."