"Drink wine and look at the moon and think of all the civilizations the moon has seen passing by"
— Omar Khayyam
|11th century mathematician, astronomer, and poet|
Thirty-six Views of the Moon
Thirty-six Views of the Moon is comprised of a collection of night exposures — left from dusk till dawn and exposed by moonlight on book pages from texts referencing the moon and night sky spanning the last ten centuries.
Working with photographic negatives of the Moon from the Lick Observatory archives in Northern California and treating each book page with Potassium ferricyanide and Ammonium ferric citrate (cyanotype) to make the surface of the page light-sensitive, the pages are then exposed overnight by the uv-light emitted by the moon. The work takes its cue from the Khayyam poem to produce a vignette of windows to the moon, inviting us to shift the direction of our gaze. To imagine the gaze of the moon looking at us and imagining ourselves as the objects of the billion years gaze.
Thirty-six Views of the Moon consists of four unique editions, each edition being produced during a season, and each having its own bibliography. Bibliography available upon request.
