Lost in space
Stepping into "Nebula," Hilary Harp and Suzie Silver's latest installation project on display at the Pittsburgh Glass Center in Friendship, is a bit like traveling on the Starship Enterprise.
All around you are glittering glass sculptures that look like the remnants of an exploded asteroid. Glowing images of space dust line the walls, and off in the distance an astral show like no other churns on a massive screen to the sound of the most eerie sci-fi music to come along since Attilio Mineo's groundbreaking 1962 album "Man in Space with Sounds."
If you are sad that Stanley Kubrick's vision of 2001 never really played out or you just can't get enough classic sci-fi TV shows such as "Flash Gordon" and "Star Trek," then this the exhibit for you.
Drawing on sources that include abstract animation, American sculpture of the '30s and '40s and photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope and electron micrography, "Nebula" is a multi-faceted, multi-sensory immersive experience.
In the gallery, 16 abstract glass sculptures created by Harp are propped up on pedestals that look as though they were borrowed from the set of "Flash Gordon."
Harp, who recently left Carnegie Mellon University, where she taught sculpture, to for a position at Arizona State University, created the pieces last year during a one-year residency at the glass center that was paid for by a Creative Heights grant from The Heinz Endowments.
Having never worked in glass before, she brings an awkwardness to the medium that underscores its inherent qualities. Looking like chunks of frozen rubble, each piece is spotlit in the overall blackened space so as to highlight its individual iridescent and fractal qualities.
Also, several of the pieces have been silvered on the inside, resulting in a spectacular display of refractive and reflective light and color that bounces onto the walls and floor in spectral fashion.
Silver, an associate professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, found her friend's works so fascinating she created a 25-minute-long, digitally manipulated animation that features Harp's sculptures filmed through the use of the old-fashioned stop-motion technique.
The result, Silver says, is "sort of envisioned as what you might see out of the viewport on the original 'Star Trek's' Enterprise."
What's amazing is that the video looks like it was generated in a 3-D computer-graphics program, except for a genuine quality almost impossible to produce by those means.
That's obvious if one takes the time to notice. For even with its symmetrical combinations, which were generated in Adobe After Effects, the compositions that play out before the viewer are not mathematical or computer-assisted fractal generations made obvious by the mere fact that there are a few jittering movements along the way.
"They're not manipulated in Photoshop in any way," Silver says about th e imagery. "They're just pictures, the way we set them up and shot them. Hardly any of this is actually computer-generated. That's a real important difference, because these are actual physical objects that have been animated frame by frame. It's shot analog by a camera and then composited in the computer. The images themselves aren't generated by the computer."
As for the music that accompanies the video, which Silver herself created, she says, "I was trying to create a combination between the New Age genre called Space Music, which I sort of like but also find kind of funny and overwrought, and various electronic noises. So, I wanted to make something that was sort of like Space Music, but not really. Kind of making fun of it in a way."
Additionally, Harp and Silver created ephemeral sculptures suggestive of space formations that they made of light-loving craft materials such as glitter, pipe-cleaners and iridescent fabric. Those works are not on display in the show, but photographs of them are. Arranged along the wall-mounted light boxes, they add an otherworldly glow to the space and play off of the iridescent qualities found in Harp's glass sculptures.
Harp and Silver have been working collaboratively since 2003. Having exhibited extensively since then, they have gained international attention with their single-channel video "The Happiest Day" (2004), which has been screened all over the world, including in the "2004 Stuttgarter Filmwinter" in Stuttgart, Germany; "ENTERmultimediale 2" in Prague; "Biennale Internazionale di Ferrara" in Ferrara, Italy; "Angle: The First International Short Film and Video Festival" in Xiamen, China, and "Arcipelago, 13th International Festival of Short Films and New Images" in Rome.
Silver says that although Harp has moved on in her academic career, the two plan on continuing with their collaborative efforts and already have begun a new project.
But, for now, "Nebula" represents the culmination of their work so far, embodying a collective fascination with old and new technologies, science, history and pop culture that gels into an enticing environment all its own.
"What we were really interested in was combining these different things into a whole world so that they can relate to each other, sort of a conversation in space."
Additional Information:
'Nebula'
What: A 'Spacedelic' installation by Hilary Harp and Suzie Silver
When: Through Jan. 5. Hours: 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays; 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Fridays-Sundays
Where: Hodge Gallery, Pittsburgh Glass Center , 5472 Penn Ave., Friendship
Details: 412-365-2145
