Cosmologies: Online Viewing Room

“A reset button for the universe pressed only once.” This phrase is from the artist Katie Paterson’s poignant Ideas series.  Nowadays, we wonder if only.

Robert Fludd, the 16th century Hermetic philosopher, was among the first to identify the relationship between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic. Fludd expressed the impulse to qualify and quantify the inherent link between man and the universe. As we now grapple for our place in the larger order of things and reckon with the contemporary moment, we have curated Cosmologies, a selection of our artists' approaches to matters of the universal. 

A portion of the proceeds from sales will go toward the Food Bank of NYC.

"Painting seems to me to be a way that you can hold onto both chaos and awe: the messy contradictions of our existence and our desire to understand the magnitude of the universe. You can be on the surface of it: it’s like walking across a lake covered in ice and you’re aware of the vastness underneath you, but there’s also something very beautiful about knowing you are skating across this surface.”

 

-Matthew Ritchie

Josiah McElheny Video Feature

"The Astronaut studies reconsider realism's spatial conventions, looking at abstract and non-western paintings as possible springboards for a different kind of space. Horizons are my enemy. Horizons establish the ground plane; as long as the horizon is visible or implicit, you are oriented. I want the viewer to be disorientated, to not know exactly where they are relative to what they’re seeing." 

 

— Mernet Larsen

"Categorizing is what humans do, and obsession is what is involved in anything you're passionate about. I like the typical repetition of rituals, of punishment and worship, jogging laps, or doing yantras. It's a beautiful cartoon of futile human acts."

 

- Simon Evans™

These “portraits” belongs to an ongoing series Fred Tomaselli calls "chemical celestial portraits of inner and outer space." Tomaselli creates likenesses based on each sitter’s astrological sign and the star map for his or her date of birth. The resulting constellation is comprised of stars named after the various drugs the subject remembers consuming, from cold medicine to cocaine. The result is an unconventional map of identity that cleverly weds the mystical and the pharmacological.

 

“The text in the chemical celestial portraits ties them to the NY Times works. In both series, words add another level of meaning to the imagery. 

 

In the early nineties I was making photograms using pills and sugar, but without text. Simultaneously, I was also making chemical celestial portrait done entirely with white prismacolor and sometimes gouache on black paper. After a while, I merged the two practices and began adding text over photograms. These works happened just before that merge.”

 

- Fred Tomaselli

Throughout his career, Mullican adapted the spirit of surrealist innovation through process (especially automatism) to his own ends. Combined with his interest in non-European cultures and philosophies, Mullican exploited the immediacy of drawing as a means of perpetual exploration and innovation. Recounting his artistic “travels” Mullican once proclaimed that he “commuted extensively between heavens and earth”; his vehicle was the mark. 1

“Time runs through everything I make. From the time of a short phone call to a glacier to the centuries of its demise; the time for the light from a dying star to pass millions of years through space to reach our eyes. A circle of beads encompassing life and death through geological time. The time on Venus ticking away on a set of station clocks. A forest growing for 100 years to become a book, unread until then. A 12-hour candle burning through a journey from planet to planet. A nano-sized grain of sand lost in the depths of an ancient desert. Why I’m drawn to time is hard to describe – it’s to do with being outside myself, and being inside a more universal network where distance and time might not necessarily even exist.”

 

-Katie Paterson

1 Jules Langser, “Mullican Paints a Picture,” ARTnews, October 1953, cited in Jones, Leslie, “Chronic Commute: Lee Mullican’s travels in drawing," James Cohan, New York, 2017.