Coal City Moondog

12/23/12
over Coal City, IL

air as an object and place

after reading about Ágnes Nemes Nagy on steve roden's blog i asked Allie to check out a collection of Nagy's poetry (titled Between) from the UIC library. one thing (of many) that i've really picked up on is her descriptions of air as a somewhat solid form:

The great sleeves of air,
air on which the bird
and the science of birds bear
themselves, wings on the fraying argument;
incalculable result
of a moment's leafy silhouette
bark and branch of a haze living upwards
like desire into the upper leaves
to inhale every three seconds
those big, frosty angels.

-----

This will be the ... do you see? Up there, where entire cubic meters
of air are still vacant, up there is nonexistence. Transparent still, open to
question. Too much wind blows through it. But nothing that a good lens
couldn't fix. With an adequate intensity of light, of course. Because such
a thin layer excludes it, such a thin layer preventing existence. The edges are
almost visible up there in the space between certainty and doubt so that it
almost becomes describable while this inverted diminution (a large dim body
of a ship) floats into the picture with its pre-natal and impenetrable storeys.

-----
the first excerpt is from the poem Between and the second from The Transformation of a Railway Station. i hope to soon be able to translate air into sculptural form in the same manner - as ephemeral phenomena and experience (to the extent of non-existence?) are becoming more and more important to my practice. i see this related to my recent obsession with earthquake lights and ball lightning.

image from the New Mexicans for Reason and Science

Update 11/12/10:
I think I made this piece (kinda) already. here. It just needs a better title and some documentation.

halo

anthelion: noun pl
A luminous, white, halo-like area occasionally seen in the sky opposite the sun on the parhelic circle.

image from here

Polychromatic Cloud

I found a new use for my opalescent tissue paper: Cloud. The previous piece using this material was The Mystery of Sprites and Jets. I don't think of this as a bettering of this idea - it is more like a piece in conversation with my other atmospheric pieces (a new 'body of work' or group is developing along this). The photos do not really do it justice, there is a lot more amazing color play in the reflections and projections (onto the wall behind the paper) that are hard to document) - it also is really light and airy, so it moves when you walk past it.
This came from my interest in an image of a polychromatic cloud and my want to make a piece with this material for the upcoming exhibition with Erica Moore called Polaris.

Cloud (tissue paper, rare earth magnets, and screws) 2010

(detail)

Kay Ryan
Cloud
-

A blue stain
creeps across
the deep pile
of the evergreens.
From inside the
forest it seems
like an interior
matter, something
wholly to do
with trees, a color
passed from one
to another, a
requirement
to which they
submit unflinchingly
like soldiers or
brave people
getting older.
Then the sun
comes back and
it's totally over.

the sky on fire

14 additions to things that happen in our atmosphere, after previous posts of mine that focused on moondogs, aurora borealis, and upper-atmosphere lightning. Most of these effects are caused by ice crystals in the earth's atmosphere. Some events happen high in the stratosphere and some happen close to the ground. Each of the links provides the source and further information on the photo. I feel like any of these may spur further playing and making in my studio - especially the green flash and sundog (parhelia).

green flash - NASA picture of the day March 21, 2004 (link)

(link to many more)

stages of a green flare (link)
(funny Pirates of the Caribbean link on the green flash at the end of At World's End)

double rainbow, west Iceland (link)

polychromatic cloud- Hidden Dunes, Death Valley National Park (link)

a sundog and it's reflection, Arches N.P. (link)

sundog in Malaysia (link)

parhelia (link)

sun pillar and sundog in Aftenposten, Norway (link)

NASA photo of the day January 23, 2003 - sun pillar in Caledon, Ontario, Canada (link)

light pillars (from street lights) on the University of Waterloo campus, Waterloo, Canada, Feb. 8, 2007 (link)

NASA picture of the day March 5, 2006 - light pillars from an ice skating rink in Fairbanks, Alaska (link)

light pillars from street lights in Sigulda, Latvia on Dec. 20, 2008 (link)

spiral over Norway caused by a failed Russian missile test on Dec. 9, 2009 (link)

supposed UFO over Phoenix, USA (link)