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Ivan Fortushniak's not from around here.

That's evident as soon as the Michigan native launches into an explanation of his new exhibition at the Salina Art Center.

"Lately my work has evolved into an idea dealing with creationism and evolution. And it just so happens that a lot of that stuff has resurfaced into the court system, I guess. I didn't have any idea it was really that heavy here in Kansas," he says.

"This was all very innocent."

Nonetheless, given the state's current political climate, the Kansas University assistant art professor is treading on contentious ground with "Evolutionary Effects," an installation that explores links between what many view as mutually exclusive theories.

It's a connection that reconciles Fortushniak's dual beliefs in God and science and allows him to make art about a subject that has fascinated him since childhood.

"I remember looking at pictures in a book on animals and seeing the page of monkeys and apes and how they lined them all up -- from lemurs to monkeys to gibbons to apes to man," he recalls. "And I couldn't read, but I remember looking at those pictures and then seeing pictures of baby gorillas and thinking, ‘Wow, we look a lot alike. There's gotta be a connection there.'"

For the exhibition, which opens today, the 32-year-old Fortushniak created a series of three-dimensional latex hominids (any two-legged primate including humans and their ancestors) that he poses in front of his paintings and drawings. The idea is to find relationships between "us," modern-day homo sapiens, and "them," ape-like creatures of 4 million years ago.

"To accomplish this, I focus on the physical and emotional tendencies that we share, including lust, fear, hunger and hate," Fortushniak says.

"Terror from above," a diorama that combines a painting by Kansas University art professor Ivan Fortushniak with latex hominid figures he created with help from artist Randy Regier, is part of an exhibition called "Evolutionary Effects" at the Salina Art Center. The show, which opens today, explores links between science and religion.

In the face of all these commonalities, he contends, it's difficult to deny modern scientific findings in favor of a literal interpretation of the creation story found in the Bible.

"I'm not opposed to religion or God at all," says Fortushniak, who was raised Catholic. "But I like to think that we can't disregard science either. ... I think it's OK for God to have made the world in 4.5 million years."

Welcome discussion

Still, Fortushniak had a brief moment of apprehension last week when called to make a presentation about his work to the Salina Art Center board. As he scanned the small audience assembled to hear his talk, a man wearing a white collar caught his eye.

Turns out the chairman of the board is a priest.

"I was so tempted to say, ‘I'm a representative of the religious right,'" jokes the Rev. Frank Coady.

But really, Coady was impressed right away with Fortushniak's ideas.

Photo Gallery: Evolutionary effects

"The pope himself has said that evolution is more than just another theory. Of course the church doesn't exonerate evolution as THE theory because she recognizes that the jury is still out on that," Coady says. "But we are not creationists. We understand the Bible is not to be taken literally, but as story, as interpretation and as myth, in the good sense of the term."

Pam Harris, exhibitions and publications designer for the art center, knows Fortushniak's show could throw fuel on an already heated statewide debate between proponents of evolution and creationism. But she welcomes the discussion.

"This is a place where artists can express their ideas," she says of the art center. "We are simply the forum in which they can express what they're thinking about."

In Fortushniak's case, she continues, the ideas have been around for centuries. Even artists in the Renaissance toiled over the connections between religion and science.

Molds used to create latex hominid figures are displayed in an installation called "Evolutionary Effects," by Kansas University art professor Ivan Fortushniak. The show, which opens today at the Salina Art Center, explores connections between religion and science.

"It's just really interesting to see what an artist with today's technology and today's materials can do with those same ideas," Harris says.

‘Brave body of work'

Not only is Fortushniak taking a bold step in a political sense, but he's also sticking his neck out artistically.

His training is in painting and drawing. But in his exploration of the origins of life and the relationship between past and present humans, he began to feel hemmed in by flat surfaces. So, inspired by films such as "Jason and the Argonauts" and "Star Wars," he began researching the technology behind stop-motion animation puppets.

He passed on his knowledge to Abilene artist and art center employee Randy Regier, who mixed up the appropriate foam-rubber concoction, poured it into molds fitted with wire armatures and baked the creatures at about 180 degrees in a conventional oven. He ended up with 50 latex hominids -- men, women and infants -- ranging from 6 to 14 inches tall.

Fortushniak taught himself to use an airbrush, strung up the figures on clotheslines in his KU studio and gave their stark-white bodies a life-like paint job. He manipulated their arms, legs and torsos, posing them in diorama-like scenes amid store-bought foliage, plastic dinosaurs, rocks and soil.

In one scene, a group of infant hominids plays with shells while an adult male and female procreate off to the side, ignoring the danger an approaching alligator poses to the children.

"That would be one way of me dealing with neglect," Fortushniak says, a domestic issue facing contemporary families in the same child-rearing has always played a role in human life.

In addition to such social narratives, Fortushniak layers elements of science and history into the work, drawing visual inspiration from visits to KU's Natural History Museum. To help reinforce the look, he even includes some of the molds from his art-making process as "artifacts" in a display case.

"It has that natural history museum credibility even though it's all fabricated," Regier says of Fortushniak's work. "It's really a wonderful show of art that goes beyond the vision of art to appear almost as history and science.

"It's a brave body of work."