Dee Breger

“Mother Nature is an artist,” Dee Breger tells us, standing in front of a large assortment of her otherworldly imagery, “and she has a sense of humor.” For evidence, she points to a digital print of a bit of soot from a burned tungsten wire magnified at 83,000 through an electron microscope. The slapdash mound of spheres and diamond shapes isn’t exactly hysterical, but it has a lock on quirky. Then there is the macabre levity of Somewhere on a Mosquito, a serene and colorful piece revealing the tiny sensory hairs that connect to nerve endings on the body of aedes egypti, a species that carries yellow and dengue fevers.

Breger, the director of microscopy at Drexel University in Philadelphia, takes images collected from electron microscopes (in gray scale, as electrons don’t register color) and uses Photoshop to add hues. The results are expectedly foreign-looking, but what’s really fascinating in IIT’s display of her work, “Seeing Beyond Our Vision,” is that almost every one of the prints here exists not just outside the realm of regular sight, but outside the realm of imagination. It seems unlikely that even the most fertile mind could conjure up the disgusting yet beautiful intricacies of a common dust bunny—a thick stew of blanket fibers, cat and human hairs, moth-wing scales and bits of sunflower pollen, which even offer a clue to when the ball was formed (summer). Like all the work here it reminds us what a radically complex and, yes, humorous place the world can be.—Josh Tyson