Central Booking presents Attract/Repel, the latest in the art and science thematic series of exhibitions featuring a selection of work from seventeen international artists who deal with the physics of push/pull magnetism, the electricity of being and a glow in the sky from light years away.

Berlin artist Julia Büttelmann’s witty low-tech contraptions promise high-tech results – some that may even defy the laws of physics, while Alan Rosner’s sculpture beckons us to an interaction that creates circles – or is it an ellipse? Julian Voss-Andreae delivers steel molded into the internal layering of buckyballs and the pintsize figure that disappears before our eyes in a physics magic act. British artist Tom Phillips brings us quantum mechanics in a flight of puzzle-like colors and shapes that both explain and defy explanation and Martha Lewis sequences a journey through thermo dynamics by turning an altered book of a British mathematical society into a visual ride. W. David Powell’s seriously playful gridded sequence of collaged found images supply us with his own singular take on the subject of physics as Barbara Rosenthal’s videos deal with words and image, flow and motion, space and time. Katherine Jackson, in her poetic etched-glass works, weaves text and image into a light show of her intuitive response to physics. The solitude and natural beauty of Leanne Bell Gonczarow’s video of a caught moment in time of light settling on a prism, entrances us with the simplicity of early moving pictures. For Paul Tecklenberg, process and image meld as light creates the perception of image-as-duality; *Carter Hodgkin’s dazzling explosions of color against the blackness of space are more than transcriptions of simulated particle collisions.

The paintings of Carolyn Prescott allow us to sit in on the very earnest electricity lessons being conferred on a young girl, at the same time Pamela Matsuda-Dunn amuses us with her response to the “theory of everything” glowing and bulging out of a textbook this student may come across. Enzo Perin, a Berlin artist debuting his work in New York, electrifies in his photographic self-portraits that resonate with more of the Monster than with Dr. Frankenstein; attraction being the province of Claire Watkins, who offers us magnetism with her stylistically elegant kinetic wall piece. Peter Thomashow promises us assemblages that touch on electro-magnetism and a gizmo that combines motion, hypnotism, and the electrical nature of dreams, as we observe the collaborative pair Torino: Margolis, each a scientist/artist, together experiment with uncontrollable impulses of the electrical type. All in all, these artists take a closer look at the forces that make our world our world, focusing on the foundations that we sometimes take for granted.