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Imagining Space
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Imaging Space
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Generations have looked to the stars for inspiration, understanding and for creativity. Views of the heavens guided journeys, provided an explanation of natural phenomena, determined agricultural cycles and supplied keys to facts about life and our surrounding world. The configuration of the stars have been interpreted as metaphors for human qualities and actions and given to literature one of its most universal points of inspiration. The centuries old examination of the stars has provided a sense of mystery as to our unique presence in this universe and has been the subject of conjecture and wonderment as to our identity, the truths of our origins and the course of the future.
The depiction of space has been seen in art as early as Paleolithic cave paintings up to and including the contemporary work of Vija Celmins. It has been a means by which time is depicted, an iconographic device to enhance the celestial meaning of religious occasions and backdrop against which the actions of others have been isolated and defined. Space has been rendered with exquisite concern for the details of nature, the transitions between light and dark and the subtleties found in the characteristics of space and their effect on the details of the earth.
We have become familiar with the specifics of space in the multitude of photographs and images in the press, on television and in other media. The barren beauty that we have come to expect of space, the awe we express at the exquisite colors seen in the photographs from Mars or photographs from the telescopes such as the Hubble are taken as almost photojournalist depictions of the outer limits. The truth of the photographic image is rarely challenged and our understanding of the universe is based upon what we see in photography regardless of image manipulation by computers and its distance from reality. The context in which the image of space is seen, whether in the press or in the museum solidifies our belief in their empirical status.
Pamela Bannos's work, Imagining Space, comes as a further attempt to define and confront photographic truth. From an artist who has "always been interested in challenging the veracity of the photographic image" this exhibition is a fascinating collaboration between a photographer and an astronomer. The work provides the viewer with a confrontation between science's ability, through ever advancing technologies, to depict visible and invisible space and an aesthetic re-interpretation and understanding of that space. In one sense, the images created by Bannos in the darkroom and independent of their scientific counterparts are a reflection of the work produced by the Hubble or radio telescopes. On another level they provide compositions in black and white that are sensuous, mysterious and often suggestive. The pairing of images, the abstract combinations of geometric structures and the almost surrealistic placement of concrete forms against amorphic areas of light offer the viewer displacing aesthetic experiences.
It might be easy to interpret Bannos's work as a manipulation of the images produced by science's investigations of the stars. It might also be easy to interpret the photographic images produced by technology, independent of her imagined depictions of spatial events, as an aesthetic adventure. Yet to do either would be wrong, for it would take away from Bannos's work her aesthetic considerations and thoughts on both the creative process and the manner in which we, as the viewer approach and understand the photographic image. Whether her images can be interpreted as science or whether they can be seen as imagined space produced through the creative application of light in the photographic process begs the question of what we expect from and believe when viewing a photographic image. The subtleties of form, the gradations of light, the unexpected juxtaposition of both tangible and suggested objects, and the imagined worlds Bannos creates in her fabricated images not only challenges the viewer to an understanding of the new and unexpected but places the scientific images in a more complex relationship to the viewer.
"Scientific images," James Elkins wrote in "The Object Stares Back, "show us parts of the world we haven't seen (like galloping horses) and parts we can never see (such as atoms), but what is ultimately engaging is the possibility that science can confound my expectations about the visual world, showing me things I cannot comprehend either as objects or as images of any sort."
Elkins could have as easily been speaking about imagined space, as seen in the Bannos creations, as he could have been referencing photographs produced by various telescopes.
David Mickenberg, Director
The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art
12/20/2000