A Pendulum Motion between Art and Science:
Jeffrey Wyckoff’s Mastery of Excess

Jeffrey Wyckoff uses his own scientific findings as a medium 
to make works of art. Science to him is a tool. It is the 
smallest common denominator out of which grows an extremely 
varied artistic production. When he employs traditional 
artistic media such as those of drawing, painting, sculpture 
and photography, science is used as their subject matter. 
Reversely, when Wyckoff works with scientific materials like 
microslides and petri dishes, the images that are transferred 
onto them contain references to the history of photography 
and of art in general. The particular richness of Wyckoff’s 
work comes forth out of this permanent oscillation and 
interchange between two very different systems in our 
society ń science and art. Fascinated by the chaotic beauty 
of the microscopic, the artist translates these impressions 
to macroscopic images. On that ordered level, the blown up 
scientific elements operate as art, and have become part of 
a different system of meaning: they inscribe themselves into 
a pictorial history of art. For example, the silkscreens 
representing enlarged cells obtain the subtle coloristic 
effect of an abstract painting.

Not only is science experienced as art, but art also is seen 
as a science. In other words, Wyckoff virtuosicly explores all 
available artistic media as a kind of laboratory to his 
disposition. Thus, the traditional contents attached to the 
names of science and art are permanently questioned and 
transposed. The four anatomical paintings of a woman, a man, 
a cat and a frog appear to be taken straight out of a science 
classroom. The photographic images transferred on the microslides 
are easily identifiable as such to the bare eye. But put under 
the microscope, they are reduced back to their structural 
components and reappear as cellular shapes. What was science 
became art, and what was art has become science again. The 
presentation of the slides in the thereto-appropriated scientific 
boxes only reinforces this blurring of interpretations.

Wyckoff’s work constantly displaces meanings. For example, the 
beauty of the polaroids turns out to be particularly disturbing 
when one realizes that its subject matter is actually blown up 
cancer cells. This awesome contradiction between our feelings and 
knowledge comes close to a defiance of our imagination and its 
finally being overpowered by a gradual raise towards an 
"unrepresentable" infinity. That sublime strategy seems to fit 
Wyckoff perfectly: the excess in representation (the repetitive 
and obsessive artistic display of similar elements) is caused 
paradoxically by the necessity to find a means of representing 
the excess (the microscopic world). In that delicate control of 
chaos, Wyckoff is no less than a master.

Hilde Van Gelder