Grimshaw
FINALIST
‘Looking into the Face of God’
"A scientific mind has no time for the bullshit of organized religion. On the other hand, astronomers look into the face of God every night they look into the universe." - James Turrell, in a discussion with Elizabeth Pearce, MONA
Science and art don’t want to do the same thing. Science is about progress whereas art wants to hold up a mirror of what we are currently doing, as a kind of moral measure. But both science and art are united in their ability to alter our perception of the world. Both deal with reality as a work of construction.
Our proposal follows the established theme in the Pharos wing of revealing the construction behind our experience of reality as something that is enabled by grand shifts of perception. We have responded to the massive platonic geometry, the implied gravitational pull and the control of light of Boullée’s Cenotaph for Newton (and its formal influence on the shape of the Pharos wing at MONA), and The Perceptual Cell by Turrell – a large spherical orb with its uncertainly human interior - located adjacent to the site for the tapestry.
Our composition visualizes a gravitational wave emanating from The Perceptual Cell, bending and reshaping experience (or as Einstein would say, Spacetime). However, we want our gravitational wave tapestry to have questionable properties and multiple interpretations, and not just be another singular representation of neutron stars colliding, or merely a dramatic rendition of vivid hallucinations possibly occurring inside The Perceptual Cell.
We hope viewers of the tapestry wonder whether the image is mathematically (digitally) generated or artistically aestheticized. We hope people feel a little disorientation regarding the perspective – that the geometry is inversible, expandable and compressable. We hope it is seen as an architectural gateway in a wall to another dimension and also that it is not seen as a separate dimension at all but that the wall is quivering as the dimension that the viewers are in, undergoes change. We wish for people to feel excited by the close observation of warm hands crafting a woolen picture of a massive quantum mechanical mystery.