Nocturnes, 2016-17
These paintings/collages originated from a collection of images torn from various printed sources over a period of 25 years. They are part of an ongoing series of works that explore the connections between the particularity of human experience and the cosmic conditions of passing time. By marking the struggles that change society with the changing configurations of the stars, an understanding of a unique event is presented as affected by a seemingly consistent night sky. Each media document is from a particular date and digitally reprinted from its archival source. The arrangement of the stars that would have been visible precisely on that date, are painted in oil below.
Over time the stars are always shifting, first by visibly moving around the North Star and then by drifting closer and farther away from each other over eons. Historical events and private memories are often felt as never-ending but are in fact transformed through interpretation and differing detail, and faded by memory and culture. The nocturnal sky, at least in our experience so far, is relentlessly ever-present – but astronomically speaking it is always new, unrepeatable.
