Dorothy Alig
This exhibit aims to highlight two hidden phenomena: one up above, the other down below.
We think of the sky above as practically a void (save for that one single galaxy we call the Milky Way, a thing that shows itself to us only late on cloudless nights when we’re in northern Wisconsin or Michigan or some such), but those Webb telescope photographs from a couple years ago told us otherwise - that the sky is jammed with thousands of galaxies. One of the particularly intriguing Webb images was of a star nursery where gases and dust particles merge to form young stars. The same elements that comprise these gases are the building blocks of everything we see, including our bodies. We are, literally, star dust. The celestial firmament, for the first time in full view, was the inspiration for the sky paintings.
Several of the paintings here are about what goes on underground: The subterranean communication between trees via networks of fungi. I learned about this by reading “Entangled Life” by Merlin Sheldon and Peter Wohllenen’s “The Hidden Life of Trees,” and I find this relationship fascinating and want to explore it in my work.