Gallery where art meets science

It has occurred to me more than once that University City Science Center employees are not paying enough attention to the contemporary-art exhibitions in their Esther M. Klein Art Gallery, which occupies at least a quarter, or possibly even a third, of the building's lobby.

I've rarely seen more than one other person in the gallery on my visits there, though I see and hear a steady stream of laughing passersby headed to and from the elevators. Do these people know what's going on under their very noses? Artists are becoming outlaw scientists and they've co-opted the Esther M. Klein Art Gallery as a laboratory for their subversive research.

For example, there's an actual robot in the latest show, "The Great Society," whose curator, Daniel Fuller, writes (cleverly, I might add, at the very end of his statement on the exhibition) that the seven artists in his show "empower themselves through new media resourcefulness, trickery, and the often strong belief in the ability of art to offer a true alternative." Those CIA mind-control experiments of the 1950s have nothing on this.

That robot, made by J Shih Chieh Huang, is out of plain sight in a back room, of course, and it's shaped like a swan and mounted on a pedestal, like any mere sculpture. But it looks capable of all kinds of mayhem, with its clear plastic squirt gun that lights up, and various exposed circuitry boards and battery packs. It produces a virtual symphony of rhythmic clicking sounds, as well, and even projects a series of color images on the wall.

And how to explain Huong Ngo's larger-than-life "Felt HAZMAT Suit," hanging in the front gallery in full view? People waiting for the elevator could see it and draw their own conclusions, as they could about his "Suit Pod (The Summer Pod)," an inflated spaceshiplike pod that sucks its air from the inside of a nearby open suitcase that is just lying on the floor. You know as well as I do what you're supposed to do when you see unattended luggage.

I watched perfectly alert and normal-looking people walk right past David Clayton's "All Systems Are Go" - which stands at the very front of the gallery - as if they didn't see it, making me wonder if there is a larger conspiracy at work. How can you possibly ignore this towering construction of industrial shelving with a chair perched inside a polyhedron at its top? You'd think they would notice the curious collection of supplies stored on one of the bottom shelves, too, including Future Floor Finish, chicken in a can, goggles and a radio.

Isaac Resnikoff's "We Run Out of Continent," which comprises a carved mask of a buffalo lying atop rolled-up sections of red and blue carpet, is one of the few unsubversive works here. It's clearly a lament for America's great promise, an eloquent elegy. Then again, who knows what's stashed inside those carpets?

CerealArt's "Old Head Young Head" pairs the street-shooting talents of Greg Tobias, 65, who gave up making art in 1995, and Megaword co-founder Dan Murphy, 30, in its Project Room, and finds not much of a generation gap between them.

Tobias and Murphy are both showing grid arrangements of standard-size snapshots of everyday sights in Philadelphia, the grittier and less calculated the better, although Murphy's photographs trump Tobias' for quotidianness. (Tobias' pictures of women seem a little more deliberately sought.)

Murphy, whose snapshots of hair-braiding shops and framed aggregations of trash were shown in Fleisher/Ollman Gallery's "Good Funky Miles" group exhibition this summer, is more interested in expressing the overall physicality or objectness of his works than Tobias seems to be, displaying his prints in fluorescent yellow and orange matboard that is reminiscent of police tape and traffic cones.

Tobias' black-and-white images occasionally bring to mind such masters of street photography as Helen Levitt and Garry Winogrand. He does have the older head, after all.