Bartalos

Projections 2 is an installation I created for the 2013 Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Awards exhibition currently on view at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco. The artwork consists of a spotlight directed at a 24″ square horizontal mirror at floor level, casting double shadows of a rotating hoop and swinging orb onto a reflected beam shooting vertically up the wall. Movement is powered by a small electric motor as well as by hand.

My construction addresses humankind’s quest to understand and visualize the universe from both scientific and artistic perspectives. I’m interested, for example, in the artist Joseph Cornell’s celestial boxes whose suspended spheres, shifting rings, and itinerant sand articulate his interpretation of the cosmos. I see his sculptures as analogous to contemporary astrophysicists’ three dimensional maps of galaxies that mark the distribution of matter in space, in that both attempt to comprehend the patterns seen in nature and the laws of physics.

Projections 2 also alludes to our connection with the cosmic sublime. Artists continually strive to re-state the vocabulary of mathematics in a graspable visual form that communicates a sense of awe and wonder. I attempt this here by referencing the physics of light, movement, space, and time by symbolic means. My approach to this work was inspired by Elizabeth Kessler’s course and book titled Picturing the Cosmos which in part addresses how artists translate indexical data into subjective imagery to describe the workings of the cosmos and humanity’s drive to comprehend its breadth and complexity.