“The Space Between” is an uplifting meditation on the nature of the universe from the vantage point of three artists, a painter, a draftsman and a sculptor. On view at Massoni Art through May 6, the stage is set by Greg Mort, an avid amateur astronomer, whose beautifully crafted watercolors depict stars and planets suspended in pure, luminous space.
Unlike the exquisitely rendered lace and apples Mort has become known for, these scenes come from the imagination. The planets lined up in a row facing their sun in “Proto System” mimic a textbook diagram but reflect in the mirrored surface of some kind of sea. The bubbles of a foaming wave in “Within–Without” are doubled in the field of shining orbs that take the place of sand on a beach.
Mort is a visionary fascinated with the twin threads shared by science and art—imagination and investigation. From a distance, his paintings seem to glow with starlight; up close, they’re alive with thousands of tiny brushstrokes. In painting after painting, he seduces his viewers into a reverie on the beauty and harmony of physics and cosmology. Although astronomy is obviously Mort’s primary subject, most of these works contain no definite reference to scale. They may refer to galaxies or just as easily, to subatomic particles, but either way, they suggest vast space, space that seems not empty but alive with natural forces yet to be understood.
Before their rotations and revolutions were quantified by science, the planets of our solar system were seen as gods. Like his father, Jon Mortis interested in the human urge to
interpret the natural forces at work in the sky, but his subject is the mythology of the sky. Sharing his father’s fine rendering skill, Mort’s precise pencil drawings are wry portraits of the gods with their trademark trappings. Mercury is fast, the perfect messenger. There are wings on his helmet and ankles, and he leans impossibly forward into his long running stride. Mort updates the god’s image by elongating his body, a distortion predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity as the god races along at near light speed.
The younger Mort takes playful delight in spotlighting the attitude and charisma of each god. Holding a conch shell aloft, “The Mystic” (Neptune) has the stagey confidence of a modern-day magician in the act of conjuring. By contrast, “The Astronomer” is a confident, mature woman quietly observing the movements of a solar system balanced in her right hand. It’s curious that Mort outlines the edges of each figure, almost in comic book style. The effect is to isolate each on the white space of the paper, effectively denying the interactions that the senior Mort is so careful to portray. Whether it’s his intent to call attention to an historical lack of understanding of the interconnectedness of all things or whether it’s simply a dramatic device is up to the viewer to decide.
The inner realms of the cosmos are Shelley Robzen’s subject. Her recent sculptures carved from Carrera white marble or cast in bronze grew from time spent with her dying sister. Her experience led her to explore states of being that the living sometimes apprehend yet can’t prove or quantify. In her two most recent series, “Anima” and “Dancing in the Clouds,” she uses the strange alchemy of making heavy white marble seem weightless to evoke the hovering of the just released soul, followed by its joyous flight.
Her sculptures dance and lift skyward. Up close, their surfaces subtly sparkle like frost, as if the hard stone is caught in the act of evaporating. Both meanings of the word “sublime” come to mind. One has to do with a pinnacle beauty or excellence; the other is chemistry’s technical term for a solid substance turning directly into vapor. The white marble swells and dips, its undulations smoother and gentler than smoke. When its curves meet along ultra-thin edges, light glows through the stone. It’s a liminal image that conjures the soul still conscious of this world but touching into the next.
Robzen’s contribution is the most haunting and perhaps the most reassuring of these works, but all three artists invite much contemplation of our place in the universe. To further this inquiry, MASSONIARThas organized a symposium, also titled “The Space Between” to “explore humankind’s enduring quest to unravel the importance of what is seen and understood, but also the significance of what is absent.” Introduced by art historian Ambassador Cynthia Snyder, the
symposium panel will include Greg Mort; Dr. Richard Mushotzky, an astrophysicist and NASA X-ray astronomer; Tom McCabe, founder and CEO of McCabe Software, Rebecca Hoffberger, founder and Director of the American Visionary Art Museum; and Erik Neil, Director of the Academy Art Museum in Easton. Sponsored by the Kent County Arts Council, this free event will be held at Garfield Center for the Arts at The Prince Theatre on Saturday, April 7 at 2 p.m.
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