ART REVIEW

Uncontrollable Experiments: It’s tempting to wax eloquent about the relationship between art and science: the shared desire to impose order, search after truth, and so on. In a series of black-and-white photographs taken at major research laboratories around the country, Catherine Wagner resists such poetic truisms--if not quite with ease, then at least with determination.

Among the things Wagner documents in a Gallery Luisotti exhibition are a glass beaker filled with dead fruit flies, a collection of bone marrow smears, a pipette stand and an ultra-high vacuum chamber (which resembles nothing so much as a constellation of exploding Jiffy Pop containers). As if mimicking science’s pretensions to rationality and objectivity, she isolates them against black backgrounds, offers a direct frontal view and employs a grid structure, so as to emphasize her subjects as specimens within larger categories of analysis.

And yet, as much as these play at being highly aestheticized typologies, they feel random, fallible, messy and utterly uncontrollable. A grid of 12 minus-86-degree freezers, which contain samples of human tissue infected with HIV, breast cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and so on, are notable more for their chaotic appearance--vertiginous piles of half-closed Tupperware containers and illegible, hand-scrawled labels--than as chilling evocations of signature 20th century calamities.

For those who are interested, this show is only a preamble. It features a selection of images from the larger series, “Art & Science: Investigating Matter,” which will be on view in its entirety at the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach early next month.

* Gallery Luisotti (RAM), Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through Nov. 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.