![]() ![]() "We're looking at the aesthetics of jellies and wanted to show them off and compliment them in nontraditional displays." "We're not displaying habitats in this show," Case says. ![]() Throughout the show, the animals float through tanks whose bottoms are lined with gleaming glass beads in various shades of blue. Not far away, in a half-spherical tank, scores of Caribbean upside-down jellies clump together to form a living carpet. "We wanted to put people in the middle of a giant swarm of jellies," says Andy Case, a marine biologist who's the aquarium's special exhibitions coordinator. Walking into a 12-by-26-foot glass "tunnel" with mirrors at either end, you're surrounded by 600 pinkish-white moon jellies, set off by blue walls. A few interactive displays discuss the animals' anatomy and life cycle, but this is primarily a sensate experience. Asked what they'd like to see in another jelly show, visitors said they wanted more of a purely visual experience, describing the creatures as "glowing, art in motion, living art."Īquarium video producer Chuck Saltsman has set art in motion in a series of videos, including one in which the " Mona Lisa" morphs into a billowing jelly. The aquarium already has the largest permanent jelly display in the world. The idea was to focus on the aesthetics of these translucent animals. Tomulonis gathered artworks from around the world, among them a dozen reproductions from Ernst Haeckel's famous 1904 lithographic series "Art Forms in Nature," Roger Brown's painting "Where Have All the Fishes Gone?," lent by the Art Institute of Chicago, and formal color photographs of lollipops by New Mexico artist Matt Gray, which "have the same glowing quality as the jellies." ![]() "This is a vast departure from what we normally do." "We really wanted pieces by artists who were either inspired by the marine environment or whose pieces evoked the marine environment," says Jaci Tomulonis, the exhibit developer for "Jellies," a $2.85 million undertaking that was three years in the making and will be on display through January 2005. An electric charge excites the neon, argon and other gases inside the vessels, creating movement and glowing color. ![]() Marcheschi calls the work he made with Seattle glass artist Jim Nowak "our homage to a little bit of miraculous beauty drifting through the ocean."Ĭomposed of 30 pieces - bowls and cones and twisted green tubes - it was inspired by the forms of jellies, kelp and other sea life. In a section called "Rhythm and Movement," the pulsing blue jelly, found in the waters around the Philippines, is juxtaposed with a David Hockney lithograph depicting a swimming pool and the motion of water. It shares space with the undulating northern sea nettle, a jelly from Japan with radial maroon stripes on its parachute-like bell, and a web of stringy tentacles that stretch longer than a foot. It brings together 10 species of the wondrous invertebrate - some never before seen in the United States - with paintings, sculpture and prints inspired by the marine world.ĭale Chihuly created an installation filled with blazing colored glass forms that suggest shells and plants, jellies and octopuses. It's one of many artworks on display in the Monterey Bay Aquarium's lovely new exhibition "Jellies: Living Art," which opens tomorrow. ![]()
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