We look to the stars to find the sublime, to fill a longing for mystery, and to answer encompassing questions about life and creation. Photographer Marky Kauffman turned to the stars after the deaths of two friends.
Marky uses light and chemistry to create universes in her Celestial Series, invoking a cosmic rhyme linking Biblical origins of creation (“Let there be light!”) and atomic ones. You can see works from this series in Moonage Daydream at Panopticon Gallery through July 31. This one, Black Sea Planets, is iin the 12th International Exhibition of Contemporary Photography, juried by Crista Dix at Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts through Aug. 14.
Making a photograph is freighted with unknowns: How will the light catalyze the chemicals? In Black Sea Planets from the Celestial Series, Marky leaps into a smaller version of the creative void, collaborating with chance to craft chemigrams – prints made by applying chemicals to photographic paper. For instance, she drops fixer-soaked coffee filters onto the paper and applies pressure. The circle mimics planets, and a firm squish results in luscious rivulets, some dense with light and some shallow.
Using that and several other applications of light and chemicals – such as sprinkling potassium ferricyanide crystals on damp photo paper – Marky crafts black space pricked with light and fluid planetary orbs that line up like billiard balls in graduated sizes, suggesting depth that could swallow you and a crisp nearness you want to reach out and touch. The painterly swirl and haze of color on each planet trumpets, once again, the hope of life.
Marky writes:
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