Open Sky presents the work of three contemporary artists who take on light and space as both material and subject to encourage us to reconsider our place in the universe. Taking a cue from James Turrell’s Dividing the Light at Pomona College—a keystone work in the Benton Museum of Art collection and the only public Sky Space in Southern California—Open Sky explores the potential of somatically affective work to investigate our embodied relationship to the universe. The artists in this exhibition—Xin Liu, Agnieszka Polska, and Marcus Zúñiga—fluidly engage scientific and artistic languages to stage experiential explorations of what it means to be human at this precarious moment.
With a background in both engineering and the visual arts, Xin Liu (born 1991, Xinjiang, China, lives and works in New York/London) has long engaged in the fertile space between the two in her multimedia projects. In The White Stone, a video and sculptural installation, a narrator searches for fallen rocket fragments that litter the desert of Southern China. Layering the individual and collective stories that we tell about the mysteries of the sky, The White Stone moves between earth and cosmos as celestial beings become terrestrial bodies.
The videos of Agnieszka Polska (born 1985, Warsaw, Poland, lives and works in Berlin) are seductive and meditative, deftly using sound and image to bring viewers into a state of altered relationship with their narratives and, ultimately, the world around them. Her animations and digital collages of images, text, and sound from the internet and beyond elicit visceral and emotional responses. The Happiest Thought is titled after Albert Einstein’s description of the moment when he understood the relativity of the gravitational field, noting that for someone falling from the roof of a house, gravity and acceleration are equivalent. Polska’s installation brings its viewers, reclining and staring at a ceiling projection with a hypnotic soundtrack, into a state of experiential free-fall in which scales of time and space are simultaneous and stretched relative only to our experience of the work.
Marcus Zúñiga (born 1990, Silver City, NM, lives and works in Los Angeles) weaves cross-cultural notions of the cosmos into installations that are grounded in the viewer’s embodied experience of light and space. His installations integrate Mesoamerican ideas about the universe, family history and spiritual practices, and references to quantum astronomy to create a physical experience of what the artist terms a “multicultural cosmic perception.” For this exhibition, Zúñiga connects the concepts undergirding the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the curandero’s space limpia, and the cosmic locator concept in a “seeing environment” that uses light, mirrors, lenses, and prisms to interact with viewers’ bodies. By creating this shifting and reactive observatory, the artist centers the subjectivity of the environment itself as a gesture toward spiritual healing.
