We heard the sky used to be a field of blue, 2020, mixed media on Mylar, 36" x 64.5". Custom lightbox made by Damon Little, in collaboration with the artist. Installation view at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito (CA), Dec 2020. Photographs 1-3 by Andria Lo, courtesy of the Headlands Center for the Arts. Photographs 4-6 by the artist.
This work is the first of a set of thirteen hanging paintings on Mylar, with each panel corresponding loosely to one of the thirteen pages of the 8th-century Dunhuang Star Atlas, found in the Mogao caves of western China. In ancient China, star atlases were supposedly used for both divination and wayfaring purposes, as valuable military, geographical and celestial data that was jealously guarded and shared sparingly.
I was fascinated by the flattened aesthetic form of ancient star charts as well as the way in which it was one of the earliest forms of attempting to make sense of the overwhelming and awe-inspiring quantity of naturally-occurring data around us. I see each of the panels in this series as a way of trying to wrestle with and understand a particular form of the environmental 'data' around me, personally: the plants depicted in we heard the sky used to be a field of blue are plants that I encountered on a regular basis at the Marin Headlands or in my own backyard Jan-June 2020, during Covid-induced quarantine. The gridded texture in the background comes from hand-cut squares of old Mylar paintings I made in 2019, which contained painted reproductions of satellite surveillance Google Image photos. As lockdown forced me to bunker down at home and transfer my life almost entirely to the virtual world, I attempted to use this painting (alongside my amateur gardening efforts) to re-ground in the slow material practices of cutting, gluing, drawing...