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- I started flying as a kind of strange hobby. I'd always wanted to fly, had taken a discovery flight, really in my early twenties, and like many things in my life and many artists', you just kind of like do something and you're like, that's my life. That's not art. And then after a while those two things start merging and I had gotten a little simple camera to record my very first solo flight 'cause I knew this was gonna be a moment I wanted to remember. And after that I just started gathering footage and I knew after a while, that there was something there. Double Horizon came out of the idea of how do we think about the environment around us? Whether that's the urban landscape, the spaces that we navigate regularly and how do we explore them? Who has authorship of those? And one of the things that I found flying, which might sort of be obvious, but it was really kind of magical for me is that I flew around the spaces that I live. I would fly basically almost the route that I would drive to work and I would fly over my house. And those spaces became absolutely new and interesting to me in a totally different way because of my shift of scale and perspective, just by being up in a plane. And so Double Horizon really looks at the way like, who has the authorship to explore? Are we surprised if you were to exit a plane and see that you had a female pilot, you know? Who has the ability to like, look out and be in these spaces? And then also, how do those familiar spaces become new to you again, through a shift of perception and time and scale. The piece itself, it's three screens and they sort of start to wrap around you. What I was trying to do was create an experience for the viewer where they almost could never get away from the horizon itself. So it takes up your entire peripheral vision. And so it bends around you a little bit to replicate a cockpit, but it also is a nod to Monet's painting of the water lilly, where it sort of slowly curves around you, where this idea of the landscape is just all-encompassing. So even the placement of the bench and the speakers as you experience the piece, is very specific. I'm so excited to have my artwork here. I love this blurring of what your expectations are for going into an art space versus going into a science space. And I think here there's so many moments where you are learning something and then you're experiencing something. And actually that question I think is really present on the viewer's mind as they walk through the entire museum is, "Oh, I'm learning a little more." And there's like, maybe we're leaning towards the didactic but that's not the goal, the singular goal of the Exploratorium. It might just be, I'm gonna experience a tornado. And then I'm gonna think about that. And maybe in a week, or maybe it's in two years, then I'm gonna understand the physics of it and actually what's happening. I've always loved and been very influenced by that notion from my early experience of being an explainer here, starting at 15 years old where it's like, I can remember that some periods I would be really engaged with the artwork and just realizing how our visuals then create an experience that then create a question. And then there were other pieces where I was like, okay, this actually helps me understand what lasers are and now I can, you know, it's very specific and it leads me to a conclusion. But I love that the Exploratorium blurs that line for us and I think in that way opens us all to like, wondering a little bit more about art and also opens us to the invitation of, you know, asking us questions about science. When I was 15 years old, I asked my parents if I could come to the tactile dome for my 15th birthday. And while we were walking to the tactile dome, someone was doing a cow eye dissection. We sat down and, you know, the Explainer, being a fantastic Explainer, was like, "How does this work? How does that work?" And at the end was like, "Hey kid, you should fill out this application." And, you know, being hired at the Exploratorium at 15 to walk around this beautiful, incredible, mysterious museum, it just fed this notion that anything is possible. That you could build anything, that you could think anything, that you could figure anything out. And I think whether or not I became an artist or I became an accountant or I had gone into literature, that level of confidence and curiosity would have stayed with me my entire life. And I'm just so excited to be showing this piece back here at the Exploratorium, it absolutely feels like full circle, 'cause I think that the Exploratorium is so deeply rooted in how I actually think of what it means to be an artist and what it means to be a teacher, to then show a piece here is really exciting.