San Francisco-based artist Klari Reis takes key aspects from science and painting, and merges them to form these colorful Petri dish paintings. Each painting is a visual representation of microscopic cellular reactions, installed in circular or amoebic clusters that contain combinations of 150, 60, or 30 plastic dishes. Reis says she blends the two fields as a means “for curiosity and exploring and documenting the natural and unnatural world with a sense of wonder and hope.”
In her 20's, Reis was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease and, as a result, she was required to undergo a number of tests. During that time, she became interested in the interactions that her blood had with various chemicals in Petri dishes and pursued that interest through studies and experimentation. Her artwork has developed into an exploration of colors and textures that emerge from the interactions between dyed plastic-epoxy polymer. The process is extremely hazardous, but the results are incredibly unpredictable chemical reactions that mimic what you might see in a chemistry lab.
