OUTERspaces

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

 

A Blogger's View of the Reception

Visit Graeme Thickins Blog for commentary and a few pix from the Artists' Reception on November 21.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

As I searched for words to inform viewers about the varied references and influences that underlie this body of work, I kept hearing the echo of a simple question I had heard often, and in various forms, during my unusual childhood.

“So, when (or how, or why) did you get so interested in space?”

I now know that these questions were just a tactful way for grown-ups to probe my obvious obsession with space. Of course, interest in space was common among my fellow budding boomers. After all, those of us who arrived on this orb around mid–20^th century had the great fortune to witness, firsthand and through inquisitive eyes, the Sputnik Era, the Space Race, and of course, Neil Armstrong’s 'one small step' onto the lunar surface.  

I was further blessed to be born of mindful parents with dominant cerebral hemispheres that were opposing, yet complementary. This work has the imprint of both of them. During WWII, my left-brained father worked as an accountant in aircraft factory in what would become Silicon Valley. He later returned to  the  Minnesotat undra to begin an entrepreneurial life in real estate.

My right-brained mother was an accomplished, lifelong artist; who was so distracted by every intriguing form and hue in the passing landscape that she knew better than to ever get a driver’s license. It was her save-everything nature that spared my first written words from the trash. They were, not surprisingly about space. Below is a two-page excerpt from that tattered 11-page treatise, circa 1955, on the nine planets plus the Sun and the moon The words were painstakingly hand-scribbled on wide-ruled manila paper and bound with two brass butterfly clips:

Jupiter

Jupiter is the biggest planet. It is Colorfill Planet. Nobody has ever Bin in it. It is far from the world. It floats in Space. It is beautiful.

 

Saturn

Saturn is very very far way from the world, It looks funny. You think you can run around It. It has a circle around It.

An obsession it was. During the 50’s, I spent too many hours in front of our B&W TV watching educational television and nerdy shows like Mr. Wizard and the (Ma) Bell Science Series which included two memorable installments produced by Frank Capra: "Our Mr. Sun" (1956) and "The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays" (1957). I once chugged three glasses of gritty, partially dissolved Ovaltine, just to get a new jar which had the last label I needed to earn a Captain Midnight secret decoder ring.

When I was old enough for chemistry and erector sets, my space passion was quickly manifest in the form of model rockets, which required both chemicals and engineering. I launched, and occasionally exploded, some 300 of them between1958-1963. Then, in a life experience reminiscent of the film “October Sky”, I won back-to-back state science fair gold medals that led to back-to-back all-expense paid trips to the Big Apple for national TV appearances: first on the CBS game show “To Tell the Truth” and then on ABC’s short-lived “Science All-Stars”. For the latter, I was also flown to Huntsville, Alabama to spend three days t NASA’s Redstone Arsenal where I met my hero – the Über rocketeer Werner Von Braun.

As fate would have it, the corporate sponsor of “Science All-Stars” was Honeywell, which at the time owned both the Pentax and Rollei camera companies. As an award for appearing on the program, I received two cameras: one for myself and one for Ramsey Junior High School.

Thus began my passion for photography. And by 1967 when I was to graduate from high school, there was growing concern that the Space Race had created a glut of scientists. Rumor had it that many astrophysicists were driving taxis. So I decided to flip my career aspirations from left brain to right. Rather than seeking admittance at MIT, Caltech or Rice, I instead enrolled at St. Olaf College, a Midwest liberal arts college with family roots. I took only the bare minimum required courses in science and math; I double majored in East Asian Studies and Art which meant a heavy dose of philosophy, photography and filmmaking with a dash of political and environmental activism thrown in.

This newfound passion for photography led to a modest grant from 3M, which was then a maker of photographic films. As part of St. Olaf’s Global Seminar, I shoot hundreds of free rolls of 8mm movie and slide film while documenting our nine-month trip around the world. One thing led to another and during my senior year I started working as a freelance rock photographer in the music business. Much like the unlikely hero in Cameron Crowe’s film “Almost Famous”, I quickly became disillusioned with show biz but not before scoring a full-page Steinway ad in the New Yorker featuring my photograph of Elton John abusing their piano.

My move into the world of high-tech entrepreneurial venturing, where I have spent the last three decades, was the result of a rejection by the Minnesota State Art Council for a grant to buy time on a breakthrough 3M machine that could reproduce color slides onto fabric. After the turndown, I borrowed $25,000 to buy that state-of-the art 3M machine and formed my first start-up just so I could pursue my artistic interest after hours.

During the intervening years, I’ve never lost my passions for space or photography, which finally came together in this work.

(GPS – 11/06)