Planetaria

In first grade the Apollo 11 landing kickstarted a preoccupation with both moon and earth. Handmade mobiles of the solar system came soon after, followed by paperbacks on binary stars and black holes and Omni magazine. Poetic concepts like the harmony of the spheres, hollow earth, and mundus imaginalis retain their appeal, while recent advancements in astrobiology and the discovery of exoplanets keep feeding the spark. (Even that early fringe Mormon “doctrine of exaltation” has a perverse attraction—the gonzo belief that in the afterlife humans, or at least pious Mormon lads, would each be granted their own personal planet. LDS, thankfully, no longer subscribes to this most pathological of postcolonial fantasies.)

The images in these grids cover a fair amount of temporal ground. Drawings I made at age 3 and 4 are juxtaposed with digital conjurings made by reconstituting my photos in generative AI. 6-inch circles cropped from old collages and paintings mingle with vintage papers and early child proto-writing. Bits of stories and characters pulled from discarded fictions and poetries circulate with fabric remnants, flea market papers, MRI bran scans, and recent paintings blended in photoshop.

With these 3x3 grids the trope of the planet has less to do with those ethereal giants way, way out there (as if they ever were), and more a visual meditation on the rush of time; remembrance and forgetting; worlds inner and outer…

An ongoing series. 22” x 22” mounted on watercolor paper.