The Walters Art Museum’s newest special exhibition, Walter Wick: Games, Gizmos and Toys in the Attic, is a collection of entertaining, interactive works produced by the co-creator of the I Spy book series, which has earned its place as the popular children’s search-and-find game.
While the theme of “discovery, wonder, and enchantment” probably appeals most to younger visitors, the exhibition offers a glimpse into the very precise and detailed work that went into Wick’s compositions.
In the first room are several photographic illustrations from Wick’s Can You See What I See? series, each with vivid colors and an almost chaotic sense of object placement, as shadows and lines overlap. At first glance, the bolts, blocks, and crayons look like they are haphazardly thrown around, but the scene actually succeeds through Wick’s meticulous, pointed placement of the objects.
The viewer’s eye is not immediately drawn to the “hidden” objects, yet the mess isn’t so visually straining that a child would give up too quickly — otherwise, the game would be no fun.
Wick uses scraps and memorabilia from his grandfather’s attic to construct the I Spy Mystery scene of Ghost in the Attic, adding an ironic personal touch to the scene — a stranger would see a mess, while the creator, Wick, would see the individual objects and their corresponding memories.
The exhibition features not only the instantly recognizable I Spy layouts but also his experimentation with visual perception and optical illusions. The works invite the visitor to participate in, essentially, being visually deceived when they look into one of Wick’s contraptions.
While the photographs may appear straightforward, the concept behind them is actually quite interesting. Wick juxtaposes the complex with the simple. For example, he uses the grade school organizational form of the Venn Diagram to create a puzzle where the viewer must categorize certain objects to fit into the various circles, forcing a kind of inductive take on sorting and classifying.
In another photograph, Wick shows a Rube Goldberg machine — or a complex, multi-stepped set-up that performs an easy task — daring the viewer not to follow it from beginning to end.
On a more whimsical note, the “Can You See What I See? Once Upon a Time” section of the exhibition showed Wick’s renditions of classic fairy tales. He invites us, once again, to view our favorite childhood stories from a different, more fantastic and colorful perspective in pieces like Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs.
But the most interesting segment, perhaps, is also the least fanciful. Taking out leafs from his book of photographs, A Drop of Water: A Book of Science and Wonder, Wick displays several beautifully captured moments that portray the most basic natural laws at work.
“Splashing Drop” (1997), for instance, is a close-up, focused photo of a water droplet bouncing up from a pool of water.
The photo is reminiscent of Dr. Harold E. Edgerton’s famous “Milk Droplet Coronet,” printed forty years earlier, which shows the crown-shaped splatter of milk against a red background.
Similarly, the photo of “Snowflake” is precisely as it sounds: It shows a single, enlarged snowflake against a blue background.
However, the process Wick used to photograph the snowflake — an emblem of his wintry Connecticut hometown — was anything but simple at the time. Using what’s known as the “snowflake bentley,” Wick caught a snowflake, transferred it onto a glass plate with a feather, and took a photo of it underneath a microscope.
The artist had to find a place cold enough, so the snowflake would not melt and lose its shape, and then, he had to take care not to physically damage it when transferring it. The result is a clear, beautiful image of a snowflake in its true form. A third photo displays a metal pin floating at the top of a glass of water.
Though, to children at least, this moment looks the hardest to capture, it actually demonstrates the simple concept of surface tension.
What Wick hoped to highlight in these photos was not only the content itself or the beauty of natural phenomena, but also the method used to take them.
During the late 1980s when computer-imaging technology was becoming the more common technique for photographers, Wick wanted to advocate for the traditional methods that, judging from his works at least, can provide accurate and startlingly beautiful images.
If the high point of the exhibition is revealing simplicity through complexity and visitor interaction, then the downfall is the miniature models. There are a couple scattered throughout the rooms, and while there is a panel of “behind-the-scenes” explanation, the problem with the models of castles and seaside towns is that their complexity is either too apparent or needs to be explained.
We can see that it took a long time to build a miniature model — the parts are small enough that we cringe when thinking of how difficult it must have been to glue them on — but the end result is quite short of spectacular.
In contrast, Wick’s piece showing a “balancing act” in the illusions section is completely genuine — the entire structure is balanced on a single, small object — and it’s because of its naturalness that we can appreciate it more than a model house.
Walter Wick: Games, Gizmos, and Toys in the Attic is an amusing and interesting exhibition, though it is more suitable for younger visitors. That’s not to count adults out, though — everyone is invited to play. The exhibition runs through Jan. 2, 2011, and admission is $6 for students.
