“Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.” — Diane Ackerman, poet
Even frequent visitors to North Adams’ Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art may have missed seeing sculptor Don Gummer’s 12-foot granite boulder adjacent to a nearby gatehouse. Suspended 10 feet above the ground and titled “Primary Separation,” the rock has been surgically bisected with an 11-inch gap. It’s an engineering triumph, and allows even small children to be spellbound by a 24-ton rock floating safely above their heads.
As you approach MASSMoCA, what isn’t missed is the luminous gold-colored sealant filling cracks in the asphalt walkway. Its seeming liquidity is eye-catching and some adults stop to touch the substance, confirming that it’s solid.
There’s much more that’s illusory, surreal and potentially hypnotizing inside the cavernous 19th century factory building with a new exhibit featuring the works of 25 artists organized by MASSMoCA curator Denise Markonish.
“One of the great things about this show is that you definitely see people going around in what I call ‘the wonder face.’ They gasp and their eyes get wide and their mouth hangs open,” Markonish said, speaking from her office.
From small holograms, offbeat films and a windowless exhibit that could double as Dr. Who’s laboratory, there is much to evoke surprise.
Among the highlights is New Yorker Charles Lindsay’s “Field Station.” You enter the darkened chamber after passing through a wall of hard plastic storage containers, or “Isopods.”
Once inside, you experience numerous dissonant sounds and sights. The theme is nautical, worldly and environmental. A curious electronic device responds to your movements. Nearby a brain coral is rigged up to wires, while a few paces away you hear the calls of humpback whales and, as Lindsay said, the “dying language” of Morse code. Inside an incubator a number of gold-leafed horseshoe crabs, caught in surveillance cameras, emit curious electronic noises.
Why horseshoe crabs? Lindsay finds them intriguing.
“Horseshoe crabs are esthetically amazing,” he said, speaking from his Preston Hollow home. “They’ve existed for 450 million years on Earth and they’re a symbol of both survivability and longevity in deep time.”
Lindsay, a world traveler, conveys a sense of ironic humor mixed with an environmental message.
“I want people to figure it out. To experience it for themselves,” he said. “You go into this space and, hopefully, it’s just this sense of discovery, like ‘What the hell is that?’”
“Everything in there feels like it’s sentient, like it’s talking to each other,” Markonish said. “I think people just love exploring that.”
Look closer and one of the displays shows a screen grab of North Pole temperatures on December 31, 2015. On that day, the Arctic measured 2 degrees above freezing, 50 degrees above normal.
“If there’s any message it’s ‘Guys, are we paying attention here?’” Lindsay said. “The fall-out from climate change is our biggest challenge — (the loss of) crops, food. It’s going to lead to strife and war.”
Also on the subject of war, or its potential, San Franciscan Michael Light has assembled photographs of atomic and hydrogen bomb testing from 1945 to 1962, ending when President Kennedy ordered a halt to above-ground detonations. Light is the author of “100 Suns,” a study of that feverishly active testing period while the government suppressed information on the lethal effects of radiation.
There’s irony to the exhibit. In the 1950s in this very building, Sprague Electric employees were designing and assembling triggers for A-bombs.
In one photograph, servicemen, their eyes shielded from the explosive light, sit calmly on Adirondack chairs several miles from a blast. They were far luckier than thousands of servicemen in the Nevada desert who awaited an A-bomb detonation in slit trenches a few miles from a detonation.
“Those troops were run right into ground zero, minutes after the detonation and they did indeed, die early,” Light said during the exhibit’s opening day. “Safety was thrown out the window and the concept was to create an atomically hardened soldier. Obviously the Army found out pretty quickly that they couldn’t do that.”
As to what he hopes viewers will ponder, the artist said “I’d like them to take away a sense of layered complication … There are layers after layers. These pictures are indeed beautiful … You have beauty and terror and the sublime being drawn towards destruction.”
Much more peaceful and sublime are small geometrical holograms created by Los Angeles artist Tristan Duke. The designs are made by carving into copper disks with a diamond-tipped stylus.
“It’s very much like drawing in the sense that anything I can envision or imagine I can create on this three-dimensional surface,” he said on opening day.
The black, nickel-finished disks whirl on a turntable under intensely focused light. Suspended inches above the disks are a tetrahedron, icosahedron, and everyone’s favorite, the icosahedron.
“It’s just a very complete illusion,” the artist said. “By focusing light you’re seeing an image that’s on the surface, but it appears to float.”
Duke’s work will be available on vinyl records of an upcoming “Star Wars” soundtrack. If intense light is focused upon the platter, the Millennium Falcon will appear.
“The idea of wonder so often gets locked in with the notion of either creativity or spectacle,” Markonish said. “I really wanted to have a show that would explore a quieter side of wonder … It’s something about the gap between knowing and not knowing.”
Perception of a different sort has been investigated for years by twin brothers Ryan and Trevor Oakes. The New York artists have revolutionized our way of viewing art by creating curved paintings.
“For hundreds of years we’ve chosen to represent that space on a flat canvas,” Trevor said while standing alongside several of their works. “The visual world, in representing three-dimensional space has been a flat paradigm for centuries.”
The brothers reasoned that our field of vision is semi-spherical, and created an easel to hold curved canvases. When you view these canvases, your eye is approximately the same distance from all areas of the painting’s surface. The image surrounds you.
“They really wanted to create a way of rendering perspectival space that would account for the fact that the world isn’t flat, Markonish said. “It really reignites the notion of perspectival drawing in a true-to-the-body-and-eye way.”
Adding to the intrigue of perspective is a curved arrangement of corrugated cardboard they created. From one point of view you can see the device and also peer directly through it. Walking past the opposite side, you may only see someone’s face, the device’s central point of focus.
An inspiration for Brooklyn artist Jen Bevin in making the short film “The Silk Poems” was the breakthrough biomedical work by Tufts professor Fiorenzo Omenetto. Some 20 years earlier, a process of liquefying silk was developed and the medical possibilities appear endless.
“It was a huge development in biomedical engineering,” Bevin said, speaking while in a museum patio. “It’s universally biocompatible. That means it can be used anywhere in the body.”
While traveling the world, the artist spent five years, off and on, compiling this film about the silk trade, which has a 5,000- year history. The most thrilling thing she’d discovered was a poem created in the 4th century by a Chinese woman.
“The poem has 7,000 possible readings,” she said. “It was all embroidered in silk in five colors relating to a way of viewing the cosmos.”
As cosmic is the revelation that silkworms weave their filaments in the same design as their DNA structure.
“(It) snakes back and forth (just as) the DNA spiral doubles back on itself and just like a web thread or like someone culling a field,” she said.
Nearby, you have the odd sense of traveling upward when viewing Megan and Murray McMillan’s short film “What Distant Sky.” The Providence-based video artists spent two weeks arranging sets for a video that begins in the building’s former coal bin and travels 57 vertical feet to the outdoors.
In the film, a young woman walks onto a large boulder of coal and then rises two stories. During the ascent, she glides past a tea ceremony before reaching the roof, where men turning winches appear to be responsible for transporting her upward.
The McMillan’s saved $25,000 by forgoing the rental of a camera track and building their own.
“The trickiest part was to build a boulder that could technically perform,” Murray said, speaking from Dallas. The plywood creation was lifted by a crane and, taking no chances, the couple hired a professional aerialist, Thea Ulrich, to balance on the boulder as it rose.
“We kind of built the whole project around her. She’s a friend,” Megan said
Hugely dependent on synchronization, the continuous film, with no editing, required 27 takes.
These exhibits are simply a fractional survey of an often wildly mysterious and frequently surreal show. The artist Light said that he was happy with the results.
“Art that can impress and animate your jaded New York curator or art collector, as well as impress and animate a five-year-old is doing something really well,” he said.