Falcon 9 launches.
Katie Paterson’s work is highly conceptual. Usually her images contain little visual information, especially her piece called History of Darkness, which literally contains NO visual image.
History of Darkness was on display in the AIC in a show called, Exposure: Matt Keegan, Katie Paterson, Heather Rasmussen, from September 3, 2011–March 4, 2012 in Gallery 188. The work is a slide archive, hundreds now but will eventually contains thousands upon thousands as it is a life-long project, of photographs taken at specific times and locations in the universe. Using telescopes, Paterson chose a point in space-time and photographed it, labeling each slide with the distance the photograph was taken, in light-years, and numbering them out of infinity. Each print is only about 5x7 in. and are completely black. The text is embossed into the mat below the print.
I love this work. What does is mean to take a photograph of nothing? Is it really nothing? There IS matter and light in the photograph – her camera was just unable to capture in the necessary wavelengths of light, and with enough power, to see it. This work also calls into question the truthfulness of the artist and the artwork itself. It is possible that Katie Paterson is lying and just making prints from unexposed film, resulting in a completely black image. I doubt this, based on some of her other work, but the question is there.
This piece is especially interesting to me because of my personal experience with caring for it at the AIC. Every week, while dusting and cleaning each frame in the galleries, her works always needed a few more minutes of my time because each week I would come in and find nose prints on the plexiglass. Yes, museum patrons got so close to the photograph trying to see what was there, that their greasy noses touched the glass and left marks for me to wipe away. This is only mildly annoying, cleaning up the prints, because I found it so interesting and hilarious that people were so sure something was there in the image they couldn’t see or were missing that they pressed their noses against the frame like children.
All The Dead Stars is another piece of Paterson’s that I like, not only conceptually but visually too. It is a map plotting all the dead stars in the observable universe recorded by humankind. Formally, I think this piece is beautiful – large, heavy, dark, and rather imposing, but resting on the floor of the gallery (Tate Triennial 2009) and leaning against the wall.
Earth–Moon–Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon), is another highly conceptual piece I really dig. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is sent via radio transmission in morse code to the moon and is reflected back to Earth and picked back up, but with some of the information missing – absorbed by the moon’s surface or thrown forever into space. The, “moon altered,” score is played in a space on a self-playing grand piano.
Yesterday, May 8th, marked the 108th anniversary of Eadweard James Muybridge’s death. Born Edward James Muggeridge (it is laughable that he changed his name to sound more French), he is a photographer that I am a little obsessed with. His locomotion work bridges the gap between art and science, and photography and science, and I am extremely interested in that right now in my own work.
In 1872, he took on the famous commission from Leland Stanford to test his theory that his horse, Occident, had all four feet off the ground at some point while running. Muybridge proved him correct by setting up a series of cameras to, each exposure triggered by a wire the horse would trip during gallop.
After some personal turmoil, involving being tried for killing his wife’s lover, he revisited the horse photographs in 1877. He improved his rotating shutter to function at 1/1000th of a second and published the photographs in July of that year. The popularity of these images prompted Muybridge to invent a projecting device, now called the zoopraxiscope, and in the 1880’s he toured Europe with the machine and a collection of lantern slides – he was able to prove that artists throughout history had been depicting galloping horses incorrectly.
Through photography we can see parts of our lives that we are physically unable to perceive with the naked eye – how exactly the human body moves, or what strands of DNA look like, or how nebulas form light years away.
Although Muybridge’s motion studies are still considered valid for scientific study, he did alter, crop, and manipulate this motion studies in order to achieve their final forms. He contact printed his negatives as cyanotypes and put them in order and then enlarged each negative onto a separate piece of glass (I’ve also heard that he sometimes changed the order of the images so they would make sense visually even if they didn’t necessarily happened successively – but I could be making this up). Then the plates were assembled to make one large glass composite to be made into a single gelatin negative by the photogravure company. The final print, called a collotype (one of which we currently have on display in Gallery 10 at AIC) is an inked print made from a plate prepared from the gelatin negative. More information about this process can be found at National Museum of American History website.
(Source: moma.org)
