"Helios" by Luke Jerram

I would love to see this amazing art installation is person! This enormous representation of our star is a companion piece to one of the moon that artist Luke Jerram created in 2017, previously here.  Of this current creation, the artist's website says:

Helios is a touring artwork of the Sun by UK artist Luke Jerram.

Measuring seven metres in diameter, the artwork features 72dpi detailed imagery* of the Sun’s surface. At an approximate scale of 1:200 million, each centimetre of the internally lit spherical sculpture represents 2000km of the Sun’s surface.

It is very dangerous to look at the Sun directly as it can damage our eyesight, so Helios provides a safe opportunity for the public to get up close to, and inspect its extraordinarily detailed surface, including sunspots, spicules and filaments. The sculpture also features the source of the solar flares which caused the Northern lights to be visible from the UK in May 2024.

As well as highlighting the science of the Sun, the artwork allows us to consider its importance in all our lives; for light, warmth, energy for our planet and how our nearest star has inspired culture and religion throughout history, all around the world.

The installation is a fusion of solar imagery, animated lighting and a specially created surround sound composition by Duncan Speakman and Sarah Anderson.

Over its lifetime, Helios will be presented in a number of different locations worldwide, both indoors and outdoors, so altering the experience and interpretation of the artwork. As it travels from place to place, it will collect personal responses, stories and mythologies, as well as highlighting the latest solar science.

Helios also acts as a venue, enabling hosts to create their own programme of Sun inspired events and activities to take place beneath the artwork, including orchestral and choral performances; space science lectures by astronauts; environmental and wellbeing discussions with scientists and activists; yoga; poetry readings; dance and theatre performances.

Helios, in ancient Greek mythology, is the god who personifies the Sun. He drove a four-horse chariot across the sky each day, giving the earth its hours and seasons.

*The imagery for the artwork has been compiled using approximately 400,000 photographs of the Sun provided by Astrophotographer Dr Stuart Green (taken between May 2018 to June 2024) and NASA observations of the Sun, with guidance from solar scientist, Professor Lucie Green of University College London (UCL).

Photo by Bec Hughes

Detail of the surface of Helios

Photo by Hugh Mothersole

Photo by James Dobson

Helios in Bath Assembly Rooms, England, Photo by Thomas Greetham

Helios at the Old Royal Naval College, London

Dinner under Helios

Silent disco under Helios by Jolade Olusanya

For the touring schedule, check Luke Jerram's site below:
https://my-helios.org/

"Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)" by Kara Walker at SFMOMA

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of seeing multi-media artist Kara Walker's newest installation, a commission for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, entitled "Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)" where a group of mystical, archetypal, mechanized characters perform magical rituals.

Photo: SFMOMA

SFMOMA's summary explains:

"Kara Walker has long been recognized for her incisive examinations of the dynamics of power and the exploitation of race and sexuality. Her work leverages expressions of fantasy and humor to confront troubling histories and dominant narratives, repossessing control in the process. Inspired by a wide range of sources, from antique dolls to Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, Walker’s new commission, Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine), considers the memorialization of trauma, the objectives of technology, and the possibilities of transforming the negative energies that plague contemporary society. Here, automatons trapped in a never-ending cycle of ritual and struggle are repositories of the human soul. They recall mechanized medieval icons that evidenced divinity, vitality, and the promise of faith. Situated within an energetically charged field of black obsidian from Mt. Konocti in Lake County — a volcanic glass with deep spiritual properties — Walker’s Gardeners evoke wonder, reflection, respite, and hope. Just past this prophetic vignette, the installation’s namesake, Fortuna, responds to each visitor with a choreographed gesture and a printed fortune fresh from her mouth — an offering of absolution and contemplation."

A figure with a hole in her torso plays a musical instrument through it. A wise and powerful figure levitates a young boy...or perhaps facilitates and eases his fall to the ground. A young girl displays a hand puppet to tell her story. A lone figure with arms torn off, and still wriggling on the ground, stands helpless. And the tall figure of Fortuna stands independent of the Garden, dispensing ticker-tape fortunes from her mouth. I got one that says "Woman and children, women and children. And men and dogs too. Cats. Mice. No one of us is safe and free."

Astoundingly, this piece is free to see, located in a public atrium, and not in the paid admission areas of the museum. It will be displayed until Spring of 2026! If you are in or near--or will be in or near--San Francisco, I highly recommend a visit to see this stunning, overwhelming installation in person.

https://www.karawalkerstudio.com/
https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/fortuna-and-the-immortality-garden-machine/

The Grace of the Sun

Grace of the Sun was a lighted installation by artist Robert Montgomery (previously here) shown at COP 26 in Glasgow, Scotland, 2021.

https://www.robertmontgomery.org/

"All This Will Feel Like A Dream..."

Here is another poster by multimedia artist and professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Piotr Szyhalski (previously here). An enormous banner of this work (25' tall by 17.5' wide) was hung at Szyhalski's new exhibition of his work at the Northwest Arts Center in Minot, North Dakota, on view now through October 14, 2023.

Visit his Instagram to see more of his work:
https://www.instagram.com/laborcamp/

https://www.minotstateu.edu/nac/

Doing Nothing

https://www.instagram.com/douglascoupland/

BEAUTY: Installation--Ian Strange

Ian Strange uses light to interrupt reality. His most recent iteration of Light Intersection just closed in Sydney, Australia. The artist says:

Commissioned by the City of Sydney, LIGHT INTERSECTIONS II inserts beams of light through the facade of a late 19th century Victorian terrace home. Appearing to puncture the building across two perspective planes, the lines of light are drawn from the building's perspective lines, abstracted and inserted back into the architecture. The series explores the hand-drawn line in the landscape. In particular, perspective lines and their relationship to art and architecture as a way of understanding, interpreting and affecting landscape.

https://ianstrange.com/

BEAUTY: Fabric Art--Megan Constance Altieri

The basis for Megan Constance Altieri's fabric/clothing art project Sonder is powerful in its simplicity.

Sonder illustrates the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as our own. In our awareness of even a single other person we begin to grasp the magnitude of the 7.6 billion coexisting realities all as specific and important as one another.

Over the past four years, Altieri has gathered fragments of overheard conversations and hand-stamped them on articles of clothing matching those of the speaker. Displaying these garments on a series of clotheslines illustrates nakedness and openness, encouraging viewers to embrace vulnerability.

Viewing these articles collectively challenges our capacity for empathy, curiosity, and awareness of others. Sonder seeks to help us grasp the beautiful complexities of humanity by allowing a momentary escape from our own lens. In exchange for our perspective, we are offered a truer understanding of our identity as a dot among a sea of dots. It recognizes that any hope of a richer perspective of humanity begins with acute awareness of others.

I love this idea as it mirrors an on-going project of my own. For the past thirty years, I too have kept a running journal of snippets of overheard public conversations, just like Altieri. I'll share some highlights at the end of this post, but first, let's take a look at a 2018 installation of Sonder mounted at the Grand Rapids Public Museum, Michigan.

Altieri's Sonder project is ongoing and its most recent installation was at the Saugatuk Center for the Arts in Michigan which closed just this month, September 2020. Here is a wonderful video made for the installation that features an interview with Altieri.

For more info, visit Altieri's site:
https://www.meganconstancealtieri.com/
And purchase a 392-page book chronicling the project:
https://www.meganconstancealtieri.com/product-page/sonder-the-art-of-empathy-through-eavesdropping

And as promised, here is my selected list of fascinating, odd, funny, or moving phrases and sentences I have overheard from conversations in public. I have heard these walking behind or passing someone on the street, or from a booth behind me in a restaurant...

“Yeah, it’s true... they all have that hair that sticks up in the back...”
“Joe always says he’d shoot the tires but no, I’d aim right at the driver and shoot his f***ing head off.”
“...and that’s somethin’ you’re s’posed to be proud of?”
“That boy can sing.”
“…and he goes, ‘You must have a real low opinion of me’…”
“…he’s coming later but for now it’s nailed shut.”
“It goes loop, loop then like this, and you’re all…”
“Well, ya hafta identify the issues…”
“He calls this kid over and says, ‘Go up to Uncle Isadore’…”
“Was my father thrown completely out of the car in the accident?”
“She was standing right next to the phone so there was no excuse.”
“Will you help me find a waffle iron?”
“He’s a dock worker in San Francisco but in his spare time he’s a philosopher and he writes these books.”
“He said, ‘I’ve got something for your nerves…’”
“I wasn’t flirting consciously…”
“The things that people think they can self-help themselves into…”
“My husband’s was approved, signed and stamped.”
“I HAVE THINGS TO DO! I’M A MAN!!!”
“All the Ken dolls were Dr. Kildare.”
“It makes me mad and I gotta get outta there before I have a melt down.”
“You’re an old drunk and you don’t know shit.”
“You know this. Your husband is a rabbit.”
“The pathologist is a really nice guy.”
“I put on this skirt and I went out and I took it off and I, like, swung it around…”
“That woman says it when she’s dying.”
“Imagine what you would wear if you were safe.”
“The universe is no big deal.”
“Remember how it used to be shiny?”
”Did John seem more relaxed to you?”
“Just a white dress, no jacket, no nothing.”
“…standing up in a hammock…”
“I’ll show you my nipple!”
“Gosh, it’s been fifteen years since I started an I.V.!”
“Wake up, eat, f**k…”
“I have two who are really good with math, and one who is…‘creative.’ But that’s a good thing!”
“Didn’t you go to jail?”
“…but the funniest thing in the world is me eating dinner with a girl and me farting…”
“I don’t hate you, I’m just saying that I don’t NOT like you.”
“The last champagne I had made me sick to my stomach.”
“I feel like a murderer, like there are severed heads everywhere…”
“Me, I spend every waking minute worrying about American Express.”
“That was the day I called you from the driveway when my mom was in that knife fight.”
“When did you go to Vegas and is that where your friend had the heart attack?”

Santcum by Levi van Veluw

Late last summer 2019, artist Levi van Veluw created an incredible installation, Sanctum, shown at Tenuta Dello Scompiglio, an Agricola and art/cultural showcase outside of Lucca, Italy.

This intense, transcendent space resonates with me deeply for many reasons and on many levels. I will let the artist explain:

"The installation Sanctum, developed especially for Tenuta Dello Scompiglio, testifying of a fictitious religious conviction, engages all the senses of the visitor. The last room where visitors ended their journey in Kerguénnec, nell'installazione 'The relativity of the matter', becomes the starting point for a more elaborate proposition in the expositive space of Dello Scompiglio. Levi van Veluw based Sanctum on of the first religious buildings, the Tabernacle, also called the tent of meeting. This tent served as a place of worship and symbolized God’s presence amidst those who had gathered.

The interior of the Tabernacle consisted of 3 spaces: the Forecourt, the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, sacred in ascending gradation. Like the Tabernacle, Levi van Veluw’s work features symmetry and harmony, to express the strive for divine perfection and reflect the divine holiness through the careful gradations of the three phases. As such, he plays with the age-old composition of the religious structure and thereby lures the spectator deeper and deeper into the Sanctuary.

After a long descent, a mysterious dark blue glow shines through a narrow crack in the wall. The visitor enters through this opening into a high-ceilinged, underground space, the forecourt. Massive columns emerge on both sides and mountains of coal lie scattered across the floor, while the path in the centre is kept open. Static forms set in repetitive sequences recall the structure of an ecstatic building, made to glorify an unknown higher purpose. The space slowly comes into view, an open passage at the end leads to what appears to be a ritual environment, the Sanctuary. Fragrant water flows through an ordered pattern of geometric incisions in the floor. At the centre, there is a chapel, composed of a detailed network of grids, boxes and openings, the Holy of Holies.

Is this an opening to a new world in which religion, again, plays an important role? Or does the artist use existing symbolisms to lure the mind into a new religion? These are questions the artist leaves the spectator with."

Please do take three minutes to watch this beautiful walk-through of the installation which will give you a clearer picture.

Many years ago, in what seems like another life now, I attended regular Friday night services at a Hindu ashram in Oakland, California. They were wonderful times, but the thing that sticks with me is the magnificent sensory experience of the main Meditation Hall. It was bathed in a low indigo-violet light and the heady smell of incense (delicious Nag Champa and Dhoop). After a video talk by the guru (or sometimes a live talk if the guru was in residence), we would chant or sing in Sanskrit (thankfully it was always projected in phonetic English on a wall), and I regularly had transcendent experiences in which I felt a unique consciousness shift. It was very special and van Veluw's Sanctum seems like it has a similar feeling with its deep, penetrating color and fragrant water, and the sense of a place that is a manifestation/representation, however limited it may be, of a state beyond the physical.

And this profound installation has been resurrected for a site specific presentation at Het HEM, a former ammunition factory, now a home for contemporary culture, in the Dutch city of Zaandam. The artist refers to it as a semi-permanent installation, so it seems to be an open-ended chance to see this marvelous piece.

"Sanctum is a deep blue chapel that appears to float in between two floors. The work invites for contemplation while examining what the architecture of the spiritual consists of. Why do we assign value to objects, to the tangible, within the immaterial realm of faith? What is the basis of our devotion to altars, relics and icons? In the colossal space of Het HEM, Sanctum tests the boundary between an artistic and a spiritual experience."

What the artist is really working with is the idea of symbols and stand-ins for ideas and states of consciousness that are beyond our physical world. These objects become the machinery of the sacred, while ritual is the technology of the sacred. Of course these things can be used in ways that are not so pure or transcendent, which is the basis of a great portion of human suffering. But in a pure form, objects and rituals can be illuminating and serve as a connection to a place in us to which we all, all of us, personally have access.

https://levivanveluw.com/