Superclusters (of thread)

Superclusters (Left)

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Superclusters  (Right)

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Billboards are typically utilized as a way of advertising commercial products or services on a large scale. Playing on this idea, these images for the Missouri Bank Art Boards (Fall 2012) represent the largest structures in the universe presently known to mankind. In a time filled with economic gloom, where one debt crisis after another rises to the surface of our attention, it is easy to lose perspective on the true scale of things. Perhaps a reminder is in order for what constitutes a big deal on a universal level and the biggest deal of all is, in fact, galaxy superclusters.

Galaxies cluster together due to gravity, and then these groups of galaxies also cluster on an even larger scale into sheets and filaments, creating galaxy superclusters (incidentally, our little galaxy makes its home in the Virgo Supercluster).

In this representation of galaxy superclusters, materials and process are as important as the image itself. The filament-like nature of images of superclusters is represented by threads. A web of delicate threads is created by using a film that stabilizes the threads while sewing. The film is later dissolved (to a degree in other works), leaving voids. Incidentally, astronomers theorize that the voids between galaxy superclusters may not be empty, but home to mysterious dark matter. The use and removal of the film acknowledges a structure that exists but is invisible.

 This submission also plays into a subject that needs advertising with the American youth:  science. From the United States ending the NASA shuttle program this summer, depending on Russia to get American astronauts off the ground to the 2011 shut down of the Tevatron, the once awesome particle accelerator near Chicago that is now obsolete due to Europe’s Large Hadron Collider, our country is falling behind in scientific innovation.