The Optics of Space presents newly commissioned moving image works by Lucy Raven and James N. Kienitz Wilkins produced for the planetarium format. The planetarium context presents highly specific viewing conditions that distinguish it from other cinematic experiences and from exhibitions in science museums. In a sense, it is a permanent installation custom built for the dome projection of an audio-visual spectacle dedicated to imaging space.

Exploring the intervention that artworks can make into preexisting systems of meaning, this project asks how the spectatorial position of the viewer might be altered if the works presented in the planetarium are authored by practitioners invested in questions surrounding image production. Can the visual and narrative conventions of this context be opened up? Raven and Kienitz Wilkins engage a discourse around the spectatorial conditions of the planetarium context. As many of their projects have operated, the two newly commissioned works make present the optical apparatus and bring the spectator into the technological mechanisms that produce a particular way of seeing, proposing alternative approaches to vision.

New York-based artist Lucy Raven’s multidisciplinary works include moving image installations, performative lectures, photography and animation. Raven’s AO takes a microscopic look into the adaptive optics system being developed at the University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab for the Giant Magellan Telescope. The work focuses on the resolution testing of precision silicon sensors produced at a custom lab onsite. These highly sensitive CCDs will be able to capture light reflected from the telescope’s massive mirror, and when combined with adaptive optics, present the promise to see far enough back in space and time to view the very origins of the universe.

James N. Kienitz Wilkins is a Brooklyn-based artist and filmmaker whose moving image works concern formal experimentation with image format and language, often reflecting on questions of access, production and technology. The Dynamic Range is a speculative essay film exploring the limits of perception through advances in camera technology, and the accompanying human presumptions which fuel such advancements.

The Optics of Space is co-commissioned by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York’s MOBIUS Fellowship Program and PUBLICS. New York-based curator Aily Nash did research in Helsinki in Summer 2017 as MOBIUS fellow at Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art. The Optics of the Space is the conclusion of this curatorial fellowship.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

James N. Kienitz Wilkins is a filmmaker and artist based in Brooklyn. His work has been selected for international film festivals and venues including the New York Film Festival, CPH:DOX, MoMA PS1, TIFF, Locarno IFF, IFFR, Migrating Forms, the Whitney Biennial, and beyond.

Lucy Raven is an artist living and working in New York. Recent solo exhibitions and presentations of her work include the Serpentine Galleries, London, the Columbus Museum of Art, Portikus, Frankfurt, the Park Avenue Armory, and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. She is a founding member of 13BC, a film production collective with Vic Brooks and Evan Calder Williams, and teaches at the Cooper Union School of Art.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Aily Nash is a curator based in New York. She is co-curator of Projections, the New York Film Festival’s artists’ film and video section, and program advisor to the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Short Film section. She recently served as a Biennial advisor and co-curator of the film program for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and was Head of Programming for the 2018 edition of the Images Festival in Toronto.

Finnish Cultural Institute in New York (FCINY) creates dialogue between Finnish and American visual arts professionals and audiences. MOBIUS Fellowship Program, established by FCINY and the Finnish Institute in London, enables international working periods and thematic projects on both sides of the Atlantic. The program is supported by the Kone Foundation.

PUBLICS is a curatorial agency with a dedicated library, event space and reading room in Vallila, Helsinki, known for its industrial working-class histories and, more recently, for its influx of divergent artistic and academic communities. PUBLICS explores a “work together” institutional model with multiple overlapping objectives, thematic strands and collaborations.