- Located in the Warehouse Arts District of St. Petersburg, the Wild Space Gallery aims to raise awareness about conservation issues in Florida.

The gallery's latest exhibit explores the relationship between nature and humanity in Timeless: Art, Science, and Nature at Archbold Biological Station.

(soaring music) - The best part of my job is being able to see the things that would otherwise be mysterious.

The natural world is cryptic, it's right under our noses, but we often don't understand what we're seeing, and I love trying to understand what we're seeing, and I love to try to be close to the things that are mysterious to us.

Archbold Biological Station is an independent science organization, it's a field station, that is based in Highlands County, Florida.

It's designed to host long-term ecological research, so by long-term, I mean decades long.

Artists, scientists, educators come from all over the world to Archbold to try and understand and get a glimpse of the very unique, highly biodiverse ecosystems that Archbold hosts, and understands and collects data on.

- The Wild Space Gallery was opened by the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation.

The foundation is a collaborative mission to save the Florida Wildlife Corridor.

So the corridor is 18 million acres of connected landscape and waterways that support wildlife and us people here in the state of Florida.

- Wild Space Gallery is established to really, I guess, to bolster, and get out the message of the Florida Wildlife Corridor.

- From our beginnings, we have incorporated storytelling, and also artwork.

Our founder, Carlton Ward, Jr., is a National Geographic photographer, and through his images, he has, and continues to, raise awareness of the wildlife corridor, and so here at the Wild Space Gallery, we hope to bring that piece of art and storytelling that has been the true vein of our values and our mission from the beginning, and spread it to the people, to bring more awareness to the corridor.

- There's a strong relationship between science and art, and so, in some ways, that's the inextricable link between science and our creative mindset, is what fuels both scientists and artists.

And often, you find those skill sets and those sensitivities in the same person, and Archbold's very lucky that we attract those types.

(upbeat music) - The title of this exhibit is Timeless: Art, Science, and Nature at Archbold Biological Station, and each piece connects to that in some way.

- I'd have to say that my favorite piece is the ant lab, which it sort of reproduces the workspace of Dr. Mark Deyrup, who was a entomologist, and has been studying ants in Florida since 1982.

And so his area, I could never decide if it was an artist's studio or a scientist's laboratory.

- We have microscopes, and you can see the little hairs on the ants, so it brings in the science down to a really small level.

And then you have the woodcut prints that show the landscape, and it pulls you back.

It pulls you in, and it pulls you back, and the farther you stand away from it, the more 3D it looks.

Then we have the people in the field, too, that do the art, science, and are in nature, so combines all three, and it gives a perspective of how many levels that nature can give us, and how much we are connected to nature.

So scientists are artists in themselves in what they produce, and we put that on display here.

- A lot of different kind of artists and scientists have worked at Archbold over the years.

One, I think, of the most unusual, would be Evelyn Gaiser, and Evelyn is a professor, she's a limnologist.

Limnologist means one who studies freshwater.

There's a lake at Archbold called Lake Annie, and so over a year's time, she studied the temperatures in Lake Annie.

And she is also a classically trained musician.

So she looked at those data points, and she said, "Huh, that looks kind of like a musical score."

So basically, she created a musical score from, using the data points.

It's curiosity, it's passion for figuring out what's going on, it's a leap of imagination.

So I think that scientists and artists have that very much in common.

Evelyn's work sort of exemplifies what happened there.

- Archbold is embedded in the corridor, and the values of that landscape, and the values of the people in that landscape, are sort of distilled in the art that you see here.

- [Liz Nail] What we do here at the gallery is try to connect people through art to nature, no matter where they're from.

- [Joe Guthrie] But our hope is that you can get that little boost of inspiration and curiosity to take you out to the field to try to experience it.

(soaring music)