The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 5

The Palm Beach Post PAGE A3 ft TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 1977 Try Your Hand at Illusion Confusion Unique Exhibit at Science Museum Viewer Role Top Priority Is it a wine glass (white on black) or two faces in profile (blact against white)? This is a typical optical illusion. It is either a very stylish young woman looking over her left shoulder or a craggy-faced old woman with a scarf around her head. By MARGO HARAKAS Pott StiH Wrltw Seeing is believing, you say? Oh, no. Far from it. A journey through the latest exhibition at the Science Museum of Palm Beach County shows that what you see and what you think you see may be light years apart.

That big, white cube you notice across the room in the first bank of displays nothing special, right! Well, scootch up close. That cube is only a folded, wing-shaped piece of cardboard, nothing more. No three-dimensional geometric. Peek through that big, black box. What you see is an Ames' chair.

Almost an abstraction, it's the simplest chair imaginable, straight-legged, straight-backed, flat seat. Lift the curtain, please. Whoops! String, nothing but string, a dozen pieces or more shooting off in crazy directions. Admire yourself in Pepper's ghost mirror. "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest one of all?" Now increase the light a tad.

Holy moley, an escapee from the Planet of the Apes! Perception, you see, is a combination of eye, mind and a particular mental set. "Sometimes," says Ralph Ewers, museum director, "it's simply that we've been conditioned to seeing things a certain way." The show, running through April 3. features Illusions in Art, Nature and Science, and though one might suspect it was put together by a Houdi-ni or a Blackstone, it actually is the brainchild of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. A great fun show, it is replete with what Ewers considers absolutely essential for a successful show interaction between the public and the exhibits. There are buttons to push, knobs to turn, arms to manipulate all giving a sense of miraculous self discovery in what we too often think is the esoteric world of science.

West Palm Beach is the only Florida stop for the exhibit. "It arrived in abominable condition," Ewers said. "Every surface had to be repainted, none of the pieces was in working order. And we did it all in less than two weeks." Because of tight space and the time involved in restoring the pieces, only half the collection is on display here. One assumes it is the better half.

Perception, the psychology and science of the phenomenon, has fascinated both scientist and artist throughout the ages. As the tape that introduces the show explains, while the scientist has regarded illusion as the cause of error in our mental processes, the artist has played upon our tricky vision to create a world of fantasy. Included in the exhibit are pieces ol amorphic art, drawings or paintings that must be viewed in a special way obliquely, for instance, or with a mirror. A distorted head drawing suddenly assumes a realistic shape when reflected in a conical mirror. Many times, what we see is tinged by expectations.

We look into a box, see a large figure and a small figure and assume the larger one to be in the foreground. We read the sign: Paris in the the spring If the words are placed in the proper order, most Turn to MUSEUM, A6 The Andromeda Galaxy, the most distant heavenly object visible with the naked eye, gives Ralph Ewers the goose bumps. He's seen it a thousand times, of course. But the thought that "the light coming into my eyes is 2 million years old (note the breathless tonal wow in the voice), to me that's neat." Neat that's science. Neat in the double sense of both exciting and orderly.

And Ewers, director of the Science Museum of Palm Beach County, has a hard time keeping his excitement in check. Science, he contends, is not some arcane body of knowledge, known and understood only by the annoint-ed tew. Heck, no. It is we and we are it. And it's here all around us, and there in the open-ended infinity of space and in the unseen molecular breakdown of UNA, and it's now and then and forever.

It's the past, present and future all merged, and it's life and nonlife and all things to everybody and to nobody, should man cease to exist. Nothing more Nothing less. Ewers', 40, who came to West Palm Beach a year and a half ago from Canada, has been living in museums, more or less, since he was 9. He wants to share with the public this great exhilaration. He wants to do away with the intimidation and the pooh-bah of science.

No hall of geology, no hall of physics, no hall of invertebrate in his museum. "We'll avoid that kind of compartmentalizing," he said. "Those dividing lines are very artificial." His obligation, he feels, is to draw it all together and present it in a way that's immediately meaningful to the viewer. "Though we don't say it too loudly, the purpose of a science museum is education. But we must do it in the most palatable and exciting way we can.

We cannot afford to be dull." That means not resorting to the easy outs. "Every museum has a pair of old radar antennae," he said with obvious disdain. "A kid whispering in the focus of one will be heard in the focus of the other. Cute, maybe. But Ewers' criticism is, "It's not important.

That's what's wrong with most museums. They deal with trivia. The hard core stuff (that museums should be about i is more difficult to package, to make equally interesting, exciting and attractive." One way of doing it is starting with the familiar and working toward the more esoteric. Then having lots and lots of participatory things. That is a super-top priority in Ewers' book.

1 Stall Photos by Bn Brink and switches for the viewer, such as Heath Randolph (above) of West Palm Beach, to work. As the perfectly square box is moved across the spokes, it appears to change shape and become distorted. The exhibit includes many interacting pieces with buttons, knobs Turn to EWERS, A6 Age, Confinement Don't Hamper ERA Pioneer Slus Tasted Victory 'We 8,000 of us were marching from the Capitol to the White House, each woman a symbol of our strength. That was just the and al Times DokVat 'I was imprisoned in England for more than three months at one time Just being in jai! W3S the Important Alice Paul jjT By MARGO HARAKAS Poll StH Writir Alice Paul at 92 is waiting for the trumpet call of victory on a battle she entered almost from the moment of her birth. Born a Quaker, which to her mind means born to the idea of equality, she entered early the foray for women's rights, learning in England (from militant Mrs.

Emmeline Pan-khurst) what we'd call today guerrilla theater: picketing and disrupting meetings and having banners torn from her grip and finally being jailed, not once but six times at least, in England and America. Miss Paul, a gray-haired woman whose mind still crackles and whose will remains indomitable, is author of the original Equal Rights Amendment. Feminists still refer to the bill as the Alice Paul Amendment, though she never has. The idea, in fact, makes her a bit uncomfortable. When she drafted the bill in 1923, she dubbed it the Lucretia Mott Amendment, another Quaker "far more important than Today Miss Paul's legs no longer lift her from her chair at a Quaker nursing home in her birthplace of Moorestown, N.J.

Her eyes, covered with cataracts, no longer read. But she's still fighting for that piece of legislation that will give to women, she feels, their rightful dignity. For more than 50 years, she's been kicking the pants of presidents, and congresses because she maintained that those in power had to be held accountable for present social injustices. The last of the turn-of-the-century revolutionary feminists, she is the woman's movement incarnate. Yet, despite the fact she is largely responsible for pushing through the 19th Amendment giving women the vote and drafting what feminists hope will become the 27th Amendment, Miss Paul has no sense of her place in history.

Asked last week by telephone if she felt the i the Connecticut Suffrage Association. They were friends, fellow crusaders, at a time when it was not easy. Miss Paul's tactics were not always popular, even with those who advocated the woman's vote. But when she saw Mrs. Pankhurst pelted with tomatoes at a British University, she was appalled.

And she understood a little better their dramatic tactics. Justice wouldn be given, she concluded. I was imprisoned in England for more than three months at one time," she said. "They were not any worse than jails in the United States. Just being in jail was the important thing.

It was proof to the world that women cared a great deal about this thing." Miss Paul became involved in the British suffrage movement in 1908 when she went to England to study. "I helped them (the English suffragists) in a humble way," she said. "Of course, I was just a student then." The "improper, unladylike" lessons learned in England she imported to this country. She returned in 1910, joined the suffrage movement with fervor and two years later was sent to Washington, D.C., as Congressional Committee passage of the ERA in Florida would be her victory, she emphatically replied, "No, no, no. I certainly don't feel that way.

I don't teel it's MY victory. "It's been very difficult for ALL the women, going back to Lucretia Molt," she said "We have tried to get for women the same rights men have, and for little girls, the same rights boys have." The voice is still hammering. insistent. "When the ERA is ratified, thousands and thousands of women can feel it's their victory not mine. All those women in Florida, putting together this marvelous campaign, it'1 llu'ir victory." Since a stroke three- years ago, Miss Paul's days are spent in her room, dictating letters and receiving an occasional visitor.

She does r.ut take well to retirement. She considers he: cuirent state of health a temporary setback. Her mind is absorbed with only one thing the ERA. "She's not interested in anything else," a friend said. History rolls off her tongue as do the names of feminist hall of famers: Jane Addams.

Susan B. Anthony, Mrs. Pankhurst, Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn's mother, who headed Unltod Pratt Inlttmtional Miss Paul Admires Bust of Lucretia Mott Turn to A6 I.