ARTIST'S NOTES
In
1609 Galileo paired a concave lens with a convex lens and forever liberated
human perception from the cosmological scale of one. Ever more powerful
microscopes and telescopes have since revealed the mysterious landscapes that
coexist within and beyond our everyday reality.
The
invention of photography some two hundred years later enabled lens-peering
scientists of that day to capture and share images from their solo journeys
into often bizarre and always fascinating realms.
My
work is inspired by those early explorations but informed by my own Rorshachian
wanderings at this intersection of science and art. I set out to explore and
photograph these unseen landscapes purely, with an artistic eye; and simply, by
searching for compelling forms, patterns, and colors that resonate with me. I
was fascinated, for example, by the similarity of bubbles forming on the
surface of my morning cup of coffee to galactic nebular bubbles sculpted by
stellar gases or once-bubbling basalt flows now frozen in Serengeti bedrock.
To
build my collection of image elements at scale one, I've used an array of
traditional photographic tools: Polaroid
SX-70, 4x5 view camera, scanner-as-camera, point & shot, hi-res digital
SLR. I’ve even created hand-made ‘cliché-verre’ negatives to record images
without the use of a camera.
To
gain entry to the micro domains, I sought access to, and special training on
sophisticated 'inverted fluorescence zoom stereomicroscopes' fitted with
digital cameras. And for celestial elements, I sorted through daily downloads
of the massive image files that stream in from satellite and space probe
cameras. In time, all these collected specimens are converted into a common
digital form and stored for future use.
The
ideas for new 'outer spaces' often arrive with serendipity; catalyzed by an article
ripped from the pages of Tuesday's NY Times Science section, a Joseph Campbell
rerun, or a NASA's Image of the Day that pop-ups up on my Google homepage.
Once
inspired, I delve into my cache of pixilated scraps and begin weaving them
together into a Pointillist-like tapestry. The early work focused on the
boundaries between Aristotle's five lifeless 'essences' (air, fire, water,
terra, and ether). The later work is more expansive; often hinting at the
emergence of primitive Darwinian life forms from primordial ooze, somewhere in
the universe. The common thread is that my outer spaces are irreverent to scale
and unconstrained by the laws of gravity or relativity.
--GPS (11/06)
"Only
through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the
universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would otherwise
have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon."
Marcel Proust