The Stars Look So Different Tonight

The chosen title, The Stars Look So Different Tonight, can be understood as a metaphor for marvelling, the starting point of the human thirst for knowledge. The artist positions here have in common a subjective approach to fundamental questions of natural as well as being investigative regarding perceptual processes and visualization strategies. Their poetic and sensual appropriation of scientific pictorial language, enriched with fictitious or hyperrealist stagings and speculative laboratories, opens up a fresh look at the familiar. The sober, objective methodologies of natural science are contrasted with experimental, sometimes playful, approaches that recognise and accept the ambivalences and mysteries of the objects under investigation.

The Eighth Continent by Anthony Carr relates to the moon. The basic material is usually made with a pinhole camera and combined with elements of celestial phenomena, lunar facts and fiction. The series is an examination of ourselves and our yearnings as well as a voyage of discovery into unknown space. In 21 Arcs photographs are arranged in a pattern of undulating lines that resemble waves in a sea of darkness. This reference to the influence of the moon on the tides also suggests light waves or interstellar radio waves. Other works, such as the Supermoon series, are constructed from parts of photographs. They are concerned with the issue of the benefits from, and damage by, space debris and the human exploitation of the moon. The photos of the Untitled (47 Rockets) and Fold Me to The Moon series are transformed by folding and unfolding into objects reminiscent of space vehicles and lunar landscapes.