Laura Emrick: THE UNIVERSE IS ACCELERATING IN ITS EXPANSION

"Astronomers Report Evidence of 'Dark Energy' Splitting the Universe" reads a recent New York Times headline. It is "one of the strangest astronomical findings in recent years." And the astrophysicists themselves are left scratching their heads in dumbfounded awe.

Such stunning cosmic speculations now unfolding in the popular news media are the subject of Laura Emrick's new work. In four successive solo shows, she has explored the science and aesthetics of Mars colonization. Now, she takes off into the primordial ether of outerspace. Inviting us to ponder the incomprehensible magnitude of the Seyfert's Sextet, Stephan's Quintet and Circinus galaxies; the Erupting Star, Backward spiral, and Elliptical galaxies; and the Helix and Trifid nebulae.

Space beauty for Emrick is sexy. Her dazzling formal compositions of interstellar color are reworkings of images gleaned from the digital archives of the Hubble Telescope, NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratories and the Goddard Space Center. She amps up their technological facture and frames them out in the fluorescent geometry of sleek plexiglas. Imagine black holes shot through with pixie dust.

Onto each image are inscribed bits of popular science — "wow" talk rendered deadpan as portentous statements of fact: "We will genetically change our bodies to adapt," "Civilizations might not overlap in space-time," "There used to be dinosaurs on earth." It is a ghosted human presence. Distant and authoritative, like a god. Which, together with the image, postures an anxious celebration of the new cosmological order.

Additionally, hovering in mid-whoosh throughout the gallery are stealth future airplanes of night-vision green plexiglas. Beautiful in their dangerous silence.

Laura Emrick has exhibited extensively in the United States and Europe. Recent solo exhibitions include "Proposal for the First Museum of Mars" at Greene Naftali Gallery, New York and "The Terraformation of Mars" at Borgmann Nathusius Gallery, Cologne. She lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Laura Emrick
THE UNIVERSE IS ACCELERATING IN ITS EXPANSION