Space is Real
“... see, all I’m saying is that minerals are a rudimentary form of consciousness, whereas the other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals.” — Alan Watts (The Tao of Philosophy, 1972)
“If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.” John Wheeler (quoting Einstein while discussing his Participatory Anthropic Principle in 1990 with writer John Horgan).
“I do take 100% seriously the idea that the world is a figment of the imagination,” John Wheeler (in remarks to physicist/science writer Jeremy Bernstein in 1985).
When we consider the fact that we emerge from the world, and are not separate from it – that the atoms in our bodies were forged in the hearts of stars billions of years ago – our exploration of the natural world becomes a way of knowing ourselves. These works explore this idea within images from NASA’s archive, either imbueing the surface of these space exploration images with salt - a mineral found in our bodies, which has a crystal structure annalogous to the ignition clouds of rockets - or else softening our default understanding of images as spaces by asserting their object-ness (their surface, their three-dimensionality). The Modernist picture plane becomes a vehicle for both participating in the image, and embracing it as an figure that shares our space. Images are a liminal space where the mental and the physical rub together and meet – where the world exists both inside and outside our heads – where looking out is the same as looking in.