Celestial Bodies
Celestial Discoveries from the Antique to the Present
June 7th – July 1st, 2007
This exhibition of Celestial Charts from 1801 by Johann Elert Bode and deep space photographs from the Hubble and Spitzer Telescopes attempts to achieve a transposition by the juxtaposition of historical mythological symbols assigned to the stars that surround our planet, to that of the deep space telescopic revelations that the Hubble Space Telescope provides. Each depiction presents our species’ efforts to understand the world around us; one through the mythic, the other by scientific advancement. To posit this work in the context of current astronomical discoveries provides a way for us to understand and gauge our own impressions of the universe, from the fanciful constellation figures of the Greeks to the unprecedented “real time” discoveries of today. Together, these transposed works provide the audience with a greater historical perspective and resonance.
Bode’s Uranographia star atlas, “ is the greatest of the old-style pictorial star atlases”, while the Hubble photographs take us into the realm of “light years” and beyond.
The Uranographia marked the end of an era. Thereafter, astronomers placed decreasing emphasis on the constellation figures depicted by the Greeks, concentrating instead on the exact measurement of position, brightness, and physical properties of the stars.
“By the end of the 19th century, 2000 years of Greek tradition had finally given way to the facts-and- figures approach of astronomical census-takers and statisticians. Where the ancient Greeks imagined their gods and heroes populating the sky, modern astronomers have discovered the existence of an equally fantastic pantheon of objects with names such as red giants, white dwarfs, Cepheid variables, pulsars, quasars, and black holes.”
Common to both works is the “false color” reality presented by the watercolor overlay of the Bode, and the technologically added false color used to enhance the extraordinary images by the Hubble. Gurari Collections has closely collaborated with Jane Neibling of PaperArt, for period watercolor, and Ditto Editions of Marblehead, Massachusetts to produce limited edition fine art digital captures.
In the long history of the print, from the oldest known printed book of 868AD till today, the development of the printing technique has undergone little change other than technological. From the block, the plate, stone and photogravure, technological advances in printmaking continue through our digital age. The process of "digital capturing" takes its place in this legacy of the print medium. Although the process does not engrave or etch a surface, digitization has the ability to capture, at the highest level of detail, image content as never before. To that end, the work exhibited in this show uses this process to facilitate the creation of these prints. Printed on cotton paper that is made by a German mill that dates to 1501, the Bode celestial charts are presented with hand watercolor. Equally, the Hubble Deep Space Telescope images are printed on similar paper that presents a deep and rich image quality. This has been achieved only through the process that Ditto Editions has developed.