Ilona Miko at the Seed Design Studio - James Scarborough

Ilona Miko at the Seed Design Studio – James Scarborough

Ilona Miko. Courtesy of the Seed Design Studio.

    A children’s song about an inchworm that’s so busy measuring the marigolds that she doesn’t stop to see how beautiful they are.
Not the case with Ilona Miko’s brain cell photographs on display at The Seed Design Studio in Santa Ana.
    The product of the research of a developmental neuroscientist—Research Fellow, Doctorate, neuroscience—these photographs bristle with the space between how-they-are and what-they-are; they bridge art and science.
How they are. Luminous, organic. Frozen snapshots of lines and pools of color like rivers that flow into tributaries that flow into oceans that are then seen from above as expanses of form and color that follow the same broad expanses of experience of which Antoine de Saint Exupery, author of The Little Prince, waxed poetic as a pilot.
    What they are. Slices half the width of a piece of paper of the brain of a mouse that she has extracted from said mouse’s cranium, frozen so to better slice, mounted on a slide, dried, and then, depending on her studied purpose, either injected with dye or else filtered through a lens; the better to highlight the different structures of the brain so she can study brain growth and, especially, auditory nerves and structures. The hue and the tone depend of the density of the tissue.
    Some images are black and white—they resemble the sort of activity that occurs Titanic-deep below the surface of the ocean. Some are in color—they resemble squiggly jet trails at wonky sunsets. All record movement. In some the movement consists of wiggly white tail ends of God-knows-what-forms. In some, the movement of tectonic plate shifts whereby continents of tissue irradiated green, red, blue, combine, separate, try to rejoin. A stroll around the room is like a romp through Walt Disney’s Fantasia, frame by frame.
    The movement—conjoined to reality—records the shifting and alignment of cells as they scurry to their final functional place; they attest to developmental migration as the brain forms.
    The most amazing thing to me is their composition. Miko perfectly crops the shapes. She balances figure and ground. Once you ascertain what these things are— I love meeses to pieces—you marvel at the microscopic world of science; how a scientist can study the way cell migration forms a nascent brain; how this data sheds light on the way our own brains form.
But all that is overshadowed by one overarching idea.
    Namely, that our brain can study the brain of a mouse to better understand our own brain; that the process of said study can result in such beautiful images; that such startling images can allow us the speculation of how the brain contemplates itself; and how it permits poets and rainbow-connectors like Robinson Jeffers to posit such insight as: “Still, the mind smiles at its own rebellions.”