Opening and Picnic: Visions in the Dark + New Branches on the Tree of Life

Ken Dunkley, Thoughts, 1973

New Installations:

Renowned for creating Thoughts, 1973, Dunkley’s holographic composition represents the first use of “serially connected” independent visual spaces. Thoughts is recognized as the first art hologram to fully utilize the holographic medium and has been credited as one of “the pivotal holograms in the development of holography as an art form.” Thoughts was featured at MoMA in 1977. Dunkley then expanded his optical odyssey to include Space Children, and the interactive hologram, Homecoming, created at the Holocenter in 2001. These works will be shown together for the first time.

Sometime in the late Renaissance, painters began to depict the patron saint of troubled vision offering her disembodied eyes to the viewer. In the most striking of these paintings, her eyes grow on a stalk like flowers or fruits waiting to be harvested. This installation connects that vision to a not-so-far future, when disembodied transplant organs will also be grown, harvested, and offered to new kinds of patrons. The imagery is rendered in morphing images via lumography, a medium developed by the artist. Clear lenses with undulating optical surfaces rearrange light rays into pictures, the same way that moving water makes patterns of sunlight at the bottom of a fountain. Matt Brand is an artist and scientist on extended exile from New York in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His studio, Zintaglio Arts, specializes in coaxing new and unexpected visual experiences from humble materials.+ Betsy Connors will present a new installation with holographic panels.