For me the destination is not as important as the adventure of the journey. That goes for my image making also. I’ve been trudging along a two-dimensional path in a three-dimensional universe.
Several years ago, and purely by chance, I read a brief account of how Einstein’s brain ended up in a jar. My own brain responded by instantly envisioning the Universe in a jar. About that same time, I had to cancel a class and needed to jump into another one — actually, any that was still open. Fate nudged me into astronomy and cosmology, and I ended up looking at the night sky through a 25 inch telescope. I’ve been hooked ever since.
As time passed, this passion changed the focus of all my art making. My focus has been on space. Deep space. What does it look like? What is it like? How can it be expressed?
Moving through art media, I finally settled on two photographic media: large-scale cyanotypes on silk (up to 30 feet), and analog photograms (up to 11×14 inches). The straightforward early cyanotypes evolved later to include fabric dying and dye printing. The flat fabric panels can be hung to create layers of space.
The photograms are created by stacking sheets of plexiglas of various shapes, and then placing or drawing transparent geometric shapes on top of these sheets. The sheets are arranged like stacks of pancakes, with film or photographic paper forming the very bottom layer. Exposure is accomplished by shining enlarger light down from directly above the constructed stack, and/or adding a burst or two of light from a flashlight coming from the sides. The resulting mix of light & dark areas creates an illusion of visual depth on the flat paper.
I’ve taken the photograms further by scanning those 2D images into 3D printing software, and then using a CNC router to convert that file into an object with volume. I’ve also been experimenting with laser-cutting those scans. Basically, having already created a 2D interpretation of 3D reality, I’m now attempting to convert that 2D interpretation directly into three-dimensional form.
Then this summer, while traveling along curvy mountain roads, my mind half present, I listened to an NPR discussion theorizing a holographic universe. The conversation circled around Black Holes (figuratively speaking), and about how Stephen Hawking described things falling into a Black Hole and being lost forever. With Black Holes, the density is super-packed matter, a point of no return. Schroedinger’s cat goes poof? Lost forever? But wait – “Houston, we have a problem!”, the opposition cries. So they propose, hypothetically, that the information in the Black Hole is projected on the event horizon as bits of data, like on film. Planes, layers, bits on a grid, a hologram, a projection. Taken to its logical conclusion, the whole Universe becomes a hologram. My mind overlays their talk onto my photograms. Well, I think, this sort of works. Works for me. I now visualize my images as a representation of the two-dimensional Universe. You cannot see the planes and the levels on each of those flat planes, but rather the shadows of the whole. Plato’s Cave comes to the twenty-first century…
Photogramic Video