Kay McKay’s photographs are filled with mystery. With their brilliant colors, soft edges and partially formed figures, they seem like something out of a vivid dream that is equally fascinating and hard to explain. What makes them even more remarkable is how they were taken. McKay’s work, currently on exhibit at Casco Bay Frames in Portland, was all photographed through a phase microscope, and each print features objects that are magnified to about 400 times their actual size.
McKay, a USM anthropology major and 20-year Navy veteran, sees these things almost every day at her job in USM’s biology department, where she does microscopy for various genetics research projects. As a visual artist working on scientific research, she sees important similarities between these two fields of interest. Science and art are intertwined, McKay said in an interview Thursday, and there is a symbiotic relationship between intellect and imagination. Both scientists and artists are concerned with looking at things in new ways to “transcend the obvious,” she said.
One of her goals as an artist is to present common things in a new way, and few would deny that she achieves this in her microphotographs. The proof is that almost no one can guess what they are looking at when they study them, and thus the viewer is forced to make his or her own interpretation. McKay offers her description with the title of each photograph.
One of them, for example, is called “G.W. on Fire.” McKay explained that part of the photograph looked to her like the head of George Washington, and the dark orange and red coloring suggested fire. “It looks like he’s in hell,” she laughed, adding that she regrets thinking such a thought about our first president. She compares her photographs to inkblots used by psychologists to evaluate people, joking “I wonder if the names I give them will give away anything about my personality.”
Captivated by the fleeting images she saw in her microscope, McKay began taking artistic microphotographs about three years ago. Working in the seclusion of a laboratory, she felt driven to share these images with people who would never otherwise get to see them. Paradoxically, her photographs reveal things that are hidden, yet they also hide what they reveal, because you have no way to tell what they really are, she said.
What is it that you are actually seeing? The primary subjects of McKay’s work are parts of flies, together with other organic and inorganic matter. Dyes and stains, used to highlight cellular activity, provide the vibrant colors which, surprisingly, are not enhanced at any point in the photographic process — each image is exactly as McKay saw it through her microscope.
In her microphotographs, she seeks to strike a balance between the “hard science” of her genetics-related work and “a softer side of humanity,” in part by emphasizing images that are round and not fully formed. Her work aims to connect with people on an emotional level, and she compares its interpretive nature to looking at clouds and seeing something unexpected in them.
During her 20 years of military service, McKay traveled all over the world, from Greenland and Antarctica, to Hawaii and Japan. She worked for the criminal investigative branch of the Navy for 10 years, living in Italy, Germany, France, Scotland, England and elsewhere in Europe. She said that her experience in the military, particularly her training in observation, has influenced her art. But whereas her military assignments in criminal investigation often involved observing negative things, she now enjoys using her training in a more positive way in her microphotography.
Working as a freelance artist since her retirement from the Navy in 1994, she has painted Old World maps, botanical portraits and other works with watercolors. “I think I was born an artist,” she explained. “I just [finally] had a chance to let it all out” after leaving the military.
McKay has placed her photographs in several places around Portland over the past couple years, including the first floor of the USM Portland Library, Punky’s on Forest Ave., The Crooked Mile coffee shop on Milk St. in the Old Port, and Ricetta’s Brickoven Pizza in South Portland.
Her first gallery exhibit, titled “View of My World… On a Microscopic Scale,” is on display until Nov. 30 at Casco Bay Frames, located in the Hannaford shopping plaza across from USM’s Portland campus. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Brian O’Keefe can be contacted at [email protected]