When I look at these crystals, it's just so amazing to have something that's
so seemingly transparent, just light up into a prismatic landscape.
It's like revealing a world that you didn't know was there.
You know, you even start to question
your own sense of visual perception.
My name is Maria Ferriera, and I'm an interdisciplinary artist.
I work primarily with video and installation.
I'm really interested in crystal structures
and patterns and visual perception.
I think it's my duty as an artist to be able
to show people the world through a different lens.
Spaces that we can't see and visualize with the naked eye.
So most people think a crystal comes in the form of gems and minerals,
but a crystal quite simply is any solid
where the atoms are arranged in an orderly pattern.
The crystals I grow are synthetic and there's two ways that I grow them.
one is crystals from solution, and essentially I mix the chemical
with some water.
As the water evaporates, the chemical crystallizes.
The second way that I grow crystals is from a melt.
So essentially, I take the chemical and I melt them,
and I crystallize that chemical at a different temperature.
Crystals without cross polarization look transparent,
so I capture pictures in a polarizing microscope.
What a polarizer does is it filters out light rays
and allows the remaining light rays to propagate in one plane.
If you have two, polarizers perpendicular to each other, once
you cross them as the light hits the crystals, light is able to refract,
which is why we see every color you can possibly think of.
Utilizing a polarizing microscope, I capture time lapses,
and I also capture thousands of pictures
highlighting all the different patterns that I'm seeing within the crystals.
Lattice was the first film I created.
I really wanted to create animations with microscopes, and I was really drawn
to all the amazing patterns and the different structures and colors.
After I've gone through the research phase, the scientific phase,
I definitely like to separate myself from the science.
And when I'm sequencing together images and time lapses,
it's more about what feels right, how compositionally it makes sense.
I almost let the film tell me the way that it wants to be arranged.
When I look at these crystals, I can't help but think of landscapes,
mountain ranges and rivers and different natural structures.
And I really wanted to create a film that highlighted
all of those different ideas.
With Via, I think there's a point where you really forget about a scale,
where you don't know if you're looking under a microscope or
if you're looking at a macroscopic scene.
I think that comparison of scale and that sort of optical
illusion is so important to the meaning of that film.
Right now, I'm working on an experimental animation,
I'm growing crystals with dye in the solution,
and as the crystal is growing, the dye molecules are orienting themselves
in certain positions to create recurring patterns.
Growing these crystals is a very meditative
process, almost like tending to a garden.
But I think one of the most exciting facets of working with
crystallography is that I never truly know how they're going to look.
It's always unique.
People are always amazed to learn that it's not computer generated imagery.
Through my work, I really hope for people to question the world around them.
Perception is such a fragile element.
I hope that with my films, people can get a different perspective.