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Behind
Your Eye
An installation
by Doug & Mike Starn |
2004
March 7 – August 8
The Neuberger Museum of Art
Purchase, NY |
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project description
“…Vision doesn’t work like a camera, the mind is
an interpreter of constantly fed information. Not just from your eyes,
but also from all of your sensory inputs simultaneously, these are
your interfaces to the world. Your mind decodes and understands the
information based on a lifetime of constructions, memories, desires
and learning…it is through all that that we ‘see’…"
D+M S
Behind Your Eye: An Installation by Doug and Mike Starn is
the artists’ first large-scale project in New York in recent
years. It will be shown in the Neuberger Museum of Art’s two
largest galleries, a space of more than 10,000 square feet. Behind
Your Eye coincides with the release of the publication Attracted
to Light, an exquisitely produced book of the Starns’ extensive
conceptual portrait series of the moths’ nocturnal journey and
the seeming gravitational force that light has over them. Forming
the core of the exhibit are more than 60 images from these photographs:
sulfur-toned silver prints on hand coated Thai mulberry paper (that
mimic the “dusty” wings of the moths) and film-still lambda
digital C-prints derived from footage shot for a project commissioned
by the Bohen Foundation and Anderson Ranch Arts Center.
The Neuberger Museum’s complete installation incorporates nearly
80 photographs, drawn from three of the Starns’ most recent
series, 2 of their transparent illuminated manuscripts and a large-scale
2-channel video projection. Behind Your Eye is curated by Dede
Young, Neuberger Museum of Art Curator of Modern and Contemporary
Art, in collaboration with Mike and Doug Starn. “This exhibition
presents an intimate look into the artists’ handmade books and
their ongoing philosophical and metaphorical dialogues with life,
bridging art to physics, biology and cognitive science. The work is
based upon the artists’ research and intuitive reflections and
interpretations of the transfer of knowledge through an elaborate
personal lexicon of metaphors,” says Ms. Young. It will be on
view from March 7 through August 8, 2004. |
Structure of Thought #7 (walktrough)
Behind Your Eye
refers not only to the mind but also to visual perception, light and
the metaphor of photosensitivity. In their work, the Starns incorporate
images of neuronal synaptic arbors overlapped and intertwined with
dentritic tree branches, underscoring the connection of the internal
and external worlds. The entrance of the Theater Gallery is a site-specific
walkthrough Shoji screen (10 x 50-foot photo-collage), Structure
of Thought 7. Sliding panels provide access to the exhibition
arranged and lit as a study library displaying neuronal scroll tables,
the preliminary hand-made books of a 2-volume dos à dos livre d’artiste, and 60 images of nocturnal moths from Attracted
to Light, individually encased in lepidoptera-like specimen boxes
dispersed on 33 desks. Floating on the far wall of the gallery, a
multi-paneled digital video still (ATL Film Still 14, 10 x
30 feet: a constellation of moths, evanescent thresholds into the
Starns' "Gravity of Light" concept), the side gallery walls
are flanked with digitally printed segmented leaves (Black Pulse—the
discarded photosensitive heart and lungs of trees).
In the adjacent gallery, on an ethereal transparent scrim is a large-scale
dual-channel video projection, "Structure of Thought" (8
minutes), an approximation of the non-linear process and architecture
of thought; a living dendritic accumulation of intersections and layers.
“The structure of thought is not sequential. It is layers upon
layers of ideas, all connected or able to connect. None of the ideas
necessarily comes first; the connections are part of the whole. There
is order to this confusion by the simple fact that they are connected.
(…) We can’t see where all the limbs go but we know they
are separate and connected, like capillaries in your body or in a
leaf.” (Lange, 1975)
The film renders the processing of information, overlapping layered
images of branches and dendrites portraying layered conduits carrying
the foundations of thought. |
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Nowhere
to Fall (download video)
The
Starns have written, “The classical metaphor of light is knowledge
and information. Trees are literally a recording of light, growing,
through photosynthesis, towards the source. Trees are mostly carbon
(and the allotrope of carbon most familiar is black). Black is,
in the color spectrum, literally the absorption of all visible light.
We use this symbolically in our silhouetted images of trees; in
this understanding, we relate the black of body of the trees to
the black of written information, the black ink on the pages of
books through thousands of years of transcribed thought and creation.
The Sun writes of its complex knowledge and describes itself, the
trees as containers of comprehensive information and layered knowledge.
The interconnectedness of trees-branches over branches into branches.
Web, network, synapses, like dendritic neurons in the brain. The
network of information and links. The pictogram nature of Chinese
calligraphy is in relation to the silhouetted form of trees; the
layered dendritic branches are in relation to the complexities of
knowledge, understanding, memory and imagination. These trees are
light written in the calligraphy of the sun.”
Aside to this video are literally illuminated manuscripts; Gravity
of Light and Behind My Eye, lit by fiber optic threads
and electroluminescent technology bring within a faint light some
of the Starns’ rough notes of their interrogations and observations
on light, excerpts from Dante’s Paradiso, and reports
from astronauts of their sensations in weightlessness, etc...
Light is the basis of photography and of vision, it is for the Starns
the most powerful force. The gravitational power and force of the
sun, the source of light, and the physics of color juxtaposed with
the control light has over their chosen subjects, has many coincidences
and convergences of physical fact and metaphor. The Starns photograph
these subjects and conceive printing techniques to elucidate their
metaphors, mixing non-traditional silver printing techniques and
hi-technology with digital manipulation. From their satellite-photographed
images in the early '90s, to the macroscopic and microscopic observations
of the nature of moths, leaves and neurons, they offer a journey
into relativity. Mike and Doug Starn, through their personal semiology,
portray new models of the mind and its conception of itself in experiencing
the world.
“Light is more than enlightenment; it is the gravity of all
our past experiences and our future, the conscious and unconscious,
the external and internal factors that drive our lives. The pull
of gravity that light has over the corporeal body of the moths is
like breathing, like thinking, impossible to deny; involuntarily,
moth’s wings bring them to the light.” (Demetrio Paparoni,
"Tree of Life," from Attracted to Light; powerHouse,
2003).
Reviews:
Art in America by
Edward Leffingwell
New York Times by
Ken Johnson
Eyemazing by Anna Holtzman
ArtNews by Lilly Wei
New York Times by
Benjamin Genocchio |
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