Across the Aether

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Research Background: The group exhibition experimented with interactions between science and art in relation to astronomy in both the natural and constructed world by 8 national, international and indigenous artists curated by Dr Felicity Spear. Artists have long looked skywards and speculated about what lies beyond the clouds both by day and at night. While artists such as David Stephenson and Thomas Ruff create photographs of the actual traces and movement of stars across the night sky and John Constable to Berndnaut Smilder have represented realistic clouds, Sky Lab: lines of sight and forces of attraction speculates on the innumerable potentials and imaginings of the sky to question the ways we receive and interpret cosmic signs in our everyday world.
Contribution: The 3 prints Across the Aether combine local landscape images with images of the night sky to create a curious amalgam of day and night, being neither one nor the other in order to draw attention to the existence of both.
My aim in this work was to reveal an impossible view of the day and night sky simultaneously using traditional and new technology by superimposing images from the iPhone App Night Sky over 3 landscape images.
Significance: The exhibition was included in National Science Week 15-23 August programming and astronomer and president of the Astronomical Society of Victoria spoke at the exhibition. The exhibition was named as one of the top 5 exhibitions to visit nationally week ending 21 August by Art Guide Australia and was reviewed in the Saturday Age 12 August.