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When broken down to a certain point, all people look the same to artist Michele Banks. Sure, humans come in different heights, shapes, hair and eye colors, but in her 16-panel piece, “Portrait of a Human,” Banks emphasizes a feature all humans have in common: cells.

“[The painting has] all different, basic, cell types — human cells. It has skin, bone, different kinds of blood cells, brain cells, liver, lungs so it’s basically — even though all human beings are all unique — everybody has all these cells,” Banks says. “So this could be a picture of anybody, really. Everybody has all these cells, so it’s a human.”

Banks’ work is on view alongside artist Kendall Nordin’s large installation “You are > than Two at Once” at the Open Gallery on the ground floor of The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Arts Center on Montgomery College’s Takoma Park/Silver Spring Campus. The exhibit, “Our Small Rooms,” featuring the two Washington, D.C.-based artists, opened Jan. 12 and will run through March 9.

Before her focus on cellular life, Banks was an abstract artist. She continues to use a technique she calls “wet-in-wet” to create her work. By painting a layer of color and applying a second color before the first dries, she achieves a bleeding effect that creates fractal patterns. The more she has experimented with this style, she says, the more people say her artwork looks like something under a microscope.

Banks’ fascination with science evolved out of her work. She regularly reads science blogs and attends conferences such as the Science Online conference in North Carolina. One of the latest scientific notions that has governed her work is the discussion of the human microbiome, which informs her pieces such as “Love and Death: Viruses” and “Love and Death: Bacteria.”

“We are not just a collection of human cells; we are an environment of other species. We all are supporting this huge community of microbes in your guts and in your skin,” Banks says. “And hopefully, if you look at the painting of viruses, you are not carrying around all of those, but everybody’s got a lot of them. It’s just a really new almost-paradigm for thinking about what it is to be human.”

Banks, 46, created the show’s art during the past 18 months. One recent piece was inspired by astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan’s statement that humans are “star stuff contemplating the stars.” Her connection to Sagan came after she lost a friend to myelodysplasia syndrome (MDS), a disease that prevents bone marrow from producing blood cells. Sagan died of complications from the disease in 1996. The piece “From the Cells to the Stars” examines life from the microscopic to the macro level.

“One of the things that I responded to on a visual level was finding pictures of supernovas, and those look amazingly like dividing cells,” Banks says.

The exhibit, part of the college-wide series “Intersections: Where Art Meets Science,” was curated by Montgomery College Assistant Professor Lincoln Mudd, 52. He worked through more than 15 submissions to select artists for the academic year’s four “Intersections.”

Mudd combined these two artists because of their overlapping themes of understanding life on a smaller scale. Kendall Nordin’s proposal included a picture of a previous major installation and some of her ideas. There were no photographs or sketches of the proposed installation piece, and Mudd opted to let her create the work as she pleased.

“[Nordin] was talking about cellular operations and systems and a sort of viewpoint of micro to the macro, and then we’re looking at Michele’s work, which is direct imagery, but also having an interesting thing in thinking about love and death,” Mudd says.

Nordin’s large installation “You are > than Two at Once” consists of several pieces of white, guitar pick-sized acetate strung together by a clear line. The main part is a layered cluster of these pieces that seems to be moving downward into more solid shapes such as thick lines and circles. The installation starts in a corner of one of the free-standing walls of the walk-through gallery and extends to another wall with a smaller cluster. Its theme, Nordin says, is meaning and how people use symbols and shapes to make sense of their environment, even if there is none to be had.

To the left of the main cluster are folded sheets of vellum an onlooker can pull out and examine. Nordin says the designs on the vellum suggest a map to give the viewer a sense of place or understanding.

“Your understanding of what a cell is or what science is or what genetic information is, plans for life, all that stuff,” Nordin says. “That’s stuff we construct.”

In conjunction with the theme of finding meaning, inside each acetate piece is a carved symbol that Nordin, 37, says suggests an indecipherable piece of information.

When hanging the site-specific installation, it was important to position the piece in such a way that light and shadow would change how people see it.

Working out of her Washington, D.C. studio, Nordin is a multimedia artist who works in video and music. She created a 22-woman rock orchestra called PANIC based in Melbourne, Australia, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2005.

For the two artists behind “Our Small Rooms,” hidden worlds have evolved into a cohesive exhibit.

“We’re looking at the same things and we come up with really different thoughts about it and I think…the watercolors have such a transparency about them,” Nordin says. “And [Banks] clearly uses them on purpose, and that’s something that I always have: some sort of sense of transparency or almost invisibility.”

tforhecz@gazette.net

“Our Small Rooms” is on view at the Open Gallery ons the ground floor of The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Arts Center on Montgomery College’s Takoma Park/Silver Spring Campus, 930 King St., Silver Spring. Gallery hours are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. An opening reception will take place from 6 to 8 p.m. on Feb. 9. Call 240-567-5821 or visit www.montgomerycollege.edu/arts-tpss/exhibitions.