Carol Saindon’s “Outside of Inside” (Photo – Garrett Rowlan)
The Sky exhibit, which opened February 21 at ArtCenter’s Williamson Gallery, presents the sky and heavens to a gallery space, so at times it feels as if you are within the vast spaces projected, installed, and hung around the Williamson’s linking rooms.
By Garrett Rowlan
The exhibition, curated by Stephen Nowlin, is part of ArtCenter’s ongoing exploration of the fusion of art and science. It features a visual lineup including contributions from Nicolaus Copernicus, to Rebeca Méndez’s depiction of the LA skyline across a day’s span in vertical stripes running from floor to ceiling, an exhibit called Any-Instant-Whatever that has its debut at the show.
The L.A. skyline occupies one wall, and rounding a corner, as if leaving the bonds of Earth itself, one finds the stars of the Milky Way as captured from a camera placed on the Gaia Spacecraft, launched in 2013 to catalog the trajectories of heavenly bodies. Caught in a seamless six-minute loop, stars are depicted in their present and projected orbits, which gives the sensation of seeing both time and space from an extraterrestrial perspective, and the almost insect-like movement of the stars produces a feeling of the micro- and macro-cosmos in one glance.
Indeed, the discrete placement of objects reinforces the openness show’s title. It is easy to wander from Carol Saindon’s Outside of Inside, a horizontal depiction of tangled galaxies rendered in tar paper, shattered glass, and buried lights to Albert Bierstadt’s 19th Century landscape paintings Mirror Lake, Yosemite Valley or Angel Espoy’s Monterey Coast, 1930, and see the sky from above and below, from the depths of space or with “soles firmly anchored on terra firma,” as Nowlin writes in the show’s introduction. Perspective is constantly shifting, from Lia Halloran’s cyanotype of The Great Comet, 2019, trailing clouds of glory, to the spider who does an unscripted walk-on in Christopher Richmond’s looped video of a rotating asteroid, Viewing Stone, 2018. The spider remminds the viewer how ultimately small we, and spiders, are in the cosmic view of things.
Leaving the exhibit, one has the feeling of stepping from the balm of a quiet chapel, a sense of vastness and yet a reductive smallness, as if one’s concerns were only part of a larger matrix. There is an awe and a comfort in that.
> The exhibit runs through August 23, 2020.
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