in every corner. Death masks of numerous
species hang on every wall—sometimes the
preparators will pull one down to check the
exact shape of the ridge above a baboon’s
eyes, or the texture of a lizard’s scales. At some
point the room was divided in two. The front
space is for fine, quiet work, but Janaszak
makes her way to the back, under the roar of
an industrial fan. She skirts past the paint
booth and stops in front of a fume hood, from
which she retrieves two model brains.
“Unseen Oceans” is an exhibit about the
fuzzy edges of our knowledge of the 70 per-
cent of the planet covered by water. The
exhibition will consist of eight main rooms,
each focusing on the work of a scientist who
uses innovative techniques to study his
or her part of the ocean. It will start at the
surface, and each room will take visitors
deeper—closer to the ocean loor.
What Janaszak is working on is for the
second room, about the topmost layer of
water and the tiny creatures that loat in it.Each model brain looks like a shriveled pitu-
itary gland that has been pulled out through
someone’s nose in a horror movie. They’re
made of cotton painted with orangey-red
acrylic paint. They are stuck through with
pins and suspended in the mouths of Dixie
cups, where they’ve been dripping clear
resin, which Janaszak dipped them in to
create a hard outer shell. At a workbench
she uses pliers to remove the pins and sets
the brains next to two halves of a waxy blue
mold. It’s the mold for some kind of insectile
creature. She explains that this thing she is
ma king is clear, so she’ll cast it in clear resin,
but its organs—like these bug brains—are
colorful. They’ve got to go inside somehow.
She considers the mold carefully. “I’m
calling it a bug, but it isn’t a bug,” she says.
It’s actually a kind of plankton. “I haven’t
had my cofee yet.” The irst thing prepara-
tors do when they start on a new exhibition
is study all the science—if they’re build-
i ng a n i m a l s, it ’s biolo g y, a n at omy, e colo g y,behavior. They experiment with building
techniques, then move on to the actual build,
all in consultation with the museum’s cura-
tors. At an art museum, the value of the work
is subjective. At Natural History, even if a kid
wipes her nose on it, a piece in an exhibition
may be her irst—or only—encounter with
a distant corner of the natural world. The
question every preparator confronts with
every new build is: Can I be enough of a scien-
tist to get this right, and enough of an artist
to make sure people remember it?
Janaszak picks up the two halves of the
mold and fits them together. She’s been
thinking all morning about this business
of suspending the brains inside the resin
bodies. The question is whether the brains
will loat. If they bob even a little as the resin
cures, they’ll leave tracks that will be visible
under gallery lighting. She screws the mold
together with one-inch bolts and holds it
away from her. “I’ll probably drill a hole in
the top somewhere,” she says, tilting it thisAbove: Hannah Rawe inesses the clay in joints on a large ish model.Opposite: In the work space at the rear of the museum’s
former power plant, a ray sculpted in clay sits between the two halves of the mold that has been created in its likeness.
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