Biological Futurism presents an immersive world inspired by scientific illustration and the adaptive capabilities of nature. Guests can enjoy a 360-degree interactive tour of the exhibition online. Challenging the divide between art and science, Biological Futurism explores topics of hybridization, environmental biology and cellular interaction through art. This virtual exhibition is a curatorial collaboration with South Florida-based art and technology organization, Interactive Initiative. Evoking memories of curio cabinets within archetypal science museums, The Frank reinvents itself as a vast display case brimming with scientific specimens – all of which are imagined, reconstructed, or transformed. Freed from the boundaries of the canvas, biological organisms dance across gallery walls and escape the constraints of time and place. Biological Futurism highlights the work of artists Judith Berk King, Georgeta Fondos, Lisa Haque, Andy Lomas, Lisa McCutcheon and Gretchen Scharnagl.

Gretchen Scharnagl (MFA, Florida International University) is an artist, educator and environmental activist whose work presents themes of global warming, pollution and rate of biodiversity loss by using found, gifted, and repurposed materials. Scharnagl’s series ‘Drawing the Anthropocene’ is embedded with “narratives of climate change, water level rise and the other ‘planetary boundaries’ we are crossing in our lifetime.” The artists’ symbolic references can be observed in After Dionysus (left): “With its plump bunch of grapes ending in bare branches and spoiled fruit, After Dionysus is surrounded by the contradictions of resolving water level rise with concrete coastal hardening that results in Land System Change and ignores the needs of coastal flora and fauna. The mining of sand is becoming a global crisis that depletes beaches and sometimes erodes the ground under the walls built to replace the depleted beaches. A plastic bag floating in the water endangers the unseen surviving adult turtles among other wildlife but also reminds us of our obsession with plastics while ignoring their potential final watery destination.”