THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 2, 1996 TAG: 9605310063
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 124 lines
HONESTLY. At the Virginia Marine Science Museum, it's hard to tell the real from the fake.
Lifelike but artificial natural environments were the modus operandi for the existing building completed in 1986. Such fool-the-eye settings are in even greater abundance throughout the new expansion, opening June 15.
Those enormous, rusty, barnacle-clad legs from the Chesapeake Light Tower standing a dozen miles offshore? Surely the structure was yanked from the Atlantic Ocean and plopped in the Virginia Beach museum's new Ocean Pavilion.
Think again. Those crusty ``metal'' legs encrusted with blue mussels and starfish were made from fiberglass. One of the ``legs'' even has a video monitor installed in it, rigged to show close-ups of barnacles and mussels.
And what about that rocky crater taking shape inside the museum's new 300,000-gallon ocean aquarium, called the Norfolk Canyon? Certainly, only Mother Nature could make such a realistic rock face, peppered with vibrant coral.
Not so. Artisans from California created the canyon by ``blowing'' concrete over a form made from PVC pipe. Then the crew spent hours tediously
sculpting the walls until they looked like home to two dozen sharks destined to inhabit the cottage-sized aquarium.
Earlier this week, curator Maylon White moved smoothly, calmly amid the chaos of this museum-in-progress. Dozens of workers were setting up new exhibits. The cabinets were in place, and electronic and audio-visual gadgetry was being installed. The new aquariums were being fitted with their ``inserts'' - actually, faux underwater environments crafted mostly from fiberglass.
Exhibit designers and fabricators were enlisted for their various specialties, White said.
Museum Services Inc., of Gainesville, Fla., was contracted to create huge whales, dolphins and sharks that now dangle from the ceiling in the main exhibit gallery.
Design Craftsmen Inc., of Midland, Mich., built the cabinets, prepared the graphics and devised the electronic and audio-visual components that enliven so many of the exhibits.
Some builders were hired for the narrowest of specialties. In the sea turtle exhibit area, White pulled out a long box containing a perfect, sculptured scene depicting tiny turtles bursting from their sand-covered nest. They looked about to make their do-or-die break for deep water.
``We used this guy for the turtles, just because he's so good at it,'' White said. All of the museum's sculpted turtles were made by Tom McFarland, a Pennsylvania schoolteacher. The staff met him at a sea turtle conference, White said.
The curator closely examined the 3-D turtle scene, turning it this way and that, in the manner of an art dealer deeply admiring his stock. ``They really have developed it to where it's difficult to tell from the real thing,'' he marveled.
It is perhaps a little like that 3-D IMAX film White recalled watching at a museum in Galveston, Texas. With 3-D movies, what's happening on screen seems downright actual. ``I got hit in the back of my head,'' he said, grinning, ``by a kid trying to catch a butterfly.''
But are these faux environments art?
Folks in the field believe so. ``I think they are, when they're done well,'' said Ray Robinson, vice president of design for the prominent exhibition firm David Manwarren Corp. of Ontario, Calif. His company is creating most of the museum's artificial environments, from the Norfolk Canyon aquarium to the ``mud bank'' in the river otters' habitat at the Owls Creek Marsh Pavilion.
``Every job, when you're dealing with animals, is unique,'' said Robinson, speaking from his California office. ``You can't just pull a design off the shelf and plug it in. With every facility, the size and shape is different. How they take care of the animals is slightly different.
``There's a lot of construction involved. And you're developing new and creative ways to just build these things.
``But, yes, there is that art component. Any time you're sculpting, you're creating.''
At the Virginia Beach museum, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike was standing watch over a school of sculptors ``texturing'' the surface of a rock-lined entrance to the Norfolk Canyon. Richard Mattice, it turned out, was a supervisor with David Manwarren.
``This is the front of Norfolk Canyon,'' Mattice said, indicating the labor under way. ``And it's supposed to match the inside of Norfolk Canyon. That rock in there is supposed to look the same as this rock out here.''
It's business as usual for Manwarren - one of about five firms in the nation that specializes in crafting lifelike artificial environments for zoos and aquariums, he said. Other current projects include museums in Lisbon, Beijing and Taiwan.
Mattice, who previously was an exhibit designer for the San Diego Zoo for 17 years, said the last major innovation in his field came 30 years ago. Until the 1960s, most museums made no pretense of re-creating nature. Creatures were kept in dull environments with flat walls. Exhibits were designed around flat shapes.
The first designer to break out and make ``real lifelike exhibits'' was Merv Larson of Tucson, Ariz., Mattice said.
His employer, David Manwarren, later pioneered the use of ``skins,'' he said. That is, he began to cast real objects, such as trees or coral or blue mussels, in a thick coat of latex. The latex mold, or skin, could then be used to cast forms in concrete, fiberglass or epoxy.
``Well, it's a little more than casting,'' Mattice said. For instance, deep inside the Norfolk Canyon is what appears to be a portion of a shipwreck.
Here's how the Manwarren artists made that shipwreck: A crew visited Jacobson's Metal Co. in Chesapeake, where they were allowed to collect pieces of a wrecked ship from which they made latex molds on the site.
The molds were sent to California, where they were cast in fiberglass, then sent back to Virginia Beach. At the museum, Manwarren's artisans spliced together the sections and installed them in the canyon, so it looks like a natural occurrence.
The level of realism has a philosophical basis, said Robinson.
``We try to be as real as we can, because we believe that's a responsibility of museums. The purpose of a museum is to educate. In order to do that, you have to represent something as truthfully as you can.''
The realism benefits the creatures, too. A natural-looking environment will be more comfortable for the animal, and elicit more natural behavior, Robinson said.
``It's important to display the animal - not just as a curiosity, or as a display item - but as an interesting piece of nature that most people wouldn't have a chance to see otherwise. And to give that animal as much respect as you can.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
LAWRENCE JACKSON/The Virginian-Pilot
A worker with David Manwarren Corp. applies texture to the sea
turtle aquarium in the Virginia Marine Science Museum expansion.'
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