Universe

Universe is a single work of art comprised of 10 separate panels that are intended to be viewed in a specific sequence. Beginning with a photograph I took of Casa Grande, a prominent feature in the Chisos Mountains located in Bend Bend National Park, I took on the task of trying to create a snapshot of our current understandings of the universe in ten over-arching themes. Painted with gouache on archival giclée prints, each panel was designed almost as if a book cover, visually inviting regardless of education or familiarity with scientific concepts, and creating a platform that can spiral out into intricate concepts. Each panel is subtitled to suggest a concept, with graphic devices pulling from visual metaphor and info-graphics. It begins with Entropy, a nod to time—linear, deep, and otherwise. Relativity is turned on its head, depending on your view, and black-on-black patterning suggests gravitational waves. Quanta simplifies a quantum field and juxtaposes it against the macro universe. Transmutation recalls the alchemists, the inventors of the science of Chemistry, and points to the engine that creates all the elemental building blocks of the universe. Emergence reminds us that the lines aren't so distinct. Energy underlies atoms which underly molecules which underly cells... and so on and for forth until complex structures such as humans, penguins, planets, and galaxies exist. Probability is the unnerving quality of uncertainty while Obscurity shows us how much we don't know, mimicking a pie chart of the composition of the universe—predominantly dark energy with about a quarter of dark matter, a pinch of hydrogen and helium gases, and an almost invisible smidge of the kind of matter that makes up everything we can see and touch and feel. Entanglement will totally blow your mind if you're not careful, but in a fascinating way, and Inflation is the red-shifting truth that everything is spreading out really, really fast. And then there's Consciousness, the fact that life (as we know it) exists in all of that, and the fact that we honestly can not measure what the heck it is or even agree on a definition of it.