Natalie & Lily's Final Statement

In our various art & science installation we discovered the capacity to merge such esoteric and non-empirical notions as that of the Sublime with that of mathematical patterns and concepts. Drawing inspiration from a plethora of sources spanning from the various Mars NASA projects, the black hole theories of Jana Levin to the renaissance exploration of natural philosophies, we were driven to experiment with various materials from both our childhood and brief scientific knowledge. A fundamental insight provided by this course was the ability to conceptualize ambitious ideas and subsequently being able to draw from both fields of art and science in visualizing these ideas. The rigorously conceptually challenging aspect of the course allowed for a bold exploration of media outside of our comfort zones, gearing away from 2 dimensional medias toward that of installation art. Many of the topics upon which we touched this semester called for a 3 or 4^th dimensional realization, pushing us to elicit a phenomenological experience for the viewer, on both a personal and universal level. A vital motif in our various installations was the strong use of mirrors not simply as a method in pushing the viewers to confront themselves in our pieces, but also as a means of creating disorientating spaces that alluded to the deceptive sense of infinity in a finite space, or the sense of a lonesome, chaotic journey through the cosmos upon which the self is brought up using various devices. In consolidating our grasp on the use of projections, we attempted to stray away from its use as a depiction of a pictorial space and rather use this as a platform for various metaphors of light both natural and synthetic. While in one installation the light alludes to the notions of creation (light filtered and pixelated brought back into itself, giving birth to its own creation), the other presented a representation of motion, defied by the anti-gravity sensation of moving through space, accented by the melancholic loss of control associated with swinging on a home-made swing.

Fundamentally influence by the works of Yayoi Kusama and her infinity rooms, fascinatingly populated by ethereal lights seeming to have no source and perpetuate infinitely, our concepts were captivated with the fundamentally scientific concerns on the infinite expanse of the universe (or lack thereof) and our place in this vast expanse. We also pulled inspiration from James Turrell, a conceptual artist whose medium is simply light. His illustration of light not just as a device to cover a surface in color but to also distort the subject, bridge back to our use of both light and mirrors to transform a space into something other than reality present. Another inspiring artist was the female Swedish painter and one of the first abstract artists Hilma Af Klint who examined the cosmos and philosophical notions of humanities place in the universe. Klint used both diagrams and paintings to explore the processes of the world and of the human body in complex spiritual systems.