A year in the making, the Superclusters are now on display at the Missouri Bank Crossroads Artboards at the intersection of Wyandotte and Southwest Blvd. Google Map. The images face west.
I am an amatuer space nerd, with the appropriate nerd crushes on the likes of Carl Sagan and Neal deGrasse Tyson. It is also immensely difficult to step back from the never-ending bombardment of minutue in our daily lives and bask in the knowledge that we are a part of a mind-boggling universe, so vast, mysterious and amazing that our jaws should be perpetually dropped. It is not a separate thing. It is us. We are in and of it. We are vast.
These images are dedicated to that wonder. They are representations of galactic superclusters, the largest known structure in the observable universe. Matter does not evenly disperse. Galaxies cluster together in sheets and filaments. The galaxy clusters then also cluster into a larger structure, hence a supercluster. Our Milky Way is in the Local Group of galaxies, which is a part of the Local, or Virgo, Supercluster.
Photo by NASA
This commission was awarded in 2011, which is also when the US dismantled it’s space shuttle program. In the same year, the Tevatron, once the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, was shut down. Many of the advances in technology and in our daily lives originated in space exploration research and development, so I am saddened by the loss of interest and funding in these areas on a national level. So I thought science needed a bit of advertising!
These should be up through January, so I hope you get a chance to take a look when you’re downtown!
Rachelle Gardner-Roe 