I never get tired of the blue sky. -- Vincent van Gogh

These images play with scale and perception and seek out traces of the mystery of the cosmos in our everyday lives. My explorations of the five elements led to making images of the sky and atmospheric phenomena to elicit a sense of wonder and mystery. When pondering the cosmos, we realize that we are indeed little and flawed and don’t know everything. This is the kind of unstable footing that I want to share with viewers. We arrive at a surface sometimes hazy and sometimes crystalline - a field of view that contains traces of the ephemeral and the ethereal.

There's this notion of an arbitrarily large imaginary sphere that is used as a mapping device in astronomical observation that puts the observer at the center under the dome of the sky; it's known as the celestial sphere. In photographing the sky, we are photographing something that is not actually there, rather making images of the atmosphere between here and the far end of space. Or in some of these images referencing that depth for example with bits of blue sky masquerading as stars as they peak through wooden slats. These layers echo the complexity and confusion that is described in the moment before clarity in the Svetasvatara Upanishad: the last obstacles that one sees before seeing the highest self or Brahman are poetically spelled out: a mist, a smoke, and a sun; a wind, fire-flies, and a fire; lightnings, a clear crystal, and a moon.

Rather than seeing through the mist or the smoke or whatever to the universe, the self is what is revealed (however they might be one in the same). To add one more cultural perspective, these seem of a piece with the mandala principle in buddhism that also has this observer-centric view, each of us looks out from the center of our life and the whole world of our experience, all of our experiences, everywhere we go, everywhere we look is our mandala. So where do we choose to direct our gaze? Or more aptly, how? The universe is only ever being seen through the veil of one's own eyes.

February 1 - March 9, 2013

Opening Reception: Friday, February 1, 2013, 7-9pm

For Hidden in the Sky, Kate MacDonnell presents richly colored and textured imagery depicting enigmatic phenomena found in the day and night sky. Like stills from a movie, the images set a context inviting the viewer to fill in bits of the narrative or enjoy the open-endedness. This is her second solo exhibition with the gallery.