Tiffany Tate, Monument, 2016, archival pigment print, 40 x 60″
Devices for seeing are a part of daily life. We experience the world as it is mediated through our phones and other digital screens. In this way the contemporary screen and the 19th century Black Mirror or Claude Glass occupy common space. Both are objects for enhancing, filtering and containing the exterior world. Both are charged with making the unknowable knowable, for providing us with an experience we can handle. The gallery space also functions as such a device, an environment designed for heightened seeing. Galleries create high contrast situations that propel works forward into a viewer’s visual field. Lights magically wash out imperfections while creating auras around works. When done correctly, even mediocre pieces look luxurious.
To See The Moon Fall From The Sky takes a different approach: our inspiration derives not from typical gallery spaces but from more shadowy constructions. Planetariums, sheds for star-gazing, pools made to reflect the moon, these are also devices for altering the experience of seeing. These spaces deliver us from darkness into illumination. As our eyes adjust we become privy to details we would not other have the ability to realize.
A planetarium brings the earthbound into almost-intimate consort with the celestial. Time and space are flattened, wherein the unknowable and the unattainable are intensified. An unreachable experience of the cosmos becomes actualized. But the question emerges: how reliable is this new information? Can we believe what we see in this blacked-out room, in this space stripped of the familiar? In this new political landscape, rife with “alternate facts”, distortions of the truth and outright lies, what does it mean to willingly believe?
Now the notion of looking away, or seeking the unknown in the night sky, takes on a new and layered meaning. Perhaps it is safer to imagine worlds unknown rather than taking a closer look at what we have made here on earth. While looking outwards may have, up until recent events, seemed optimistic, exciting, adventurous, there is an argument to be made that it now seems escapist. Do we look away as to not have to look inwards?
SPRING/BREAK Art Show: 4 Times Square (entrance at 43rd St.), New York, NY
