Space

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Music

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I THINK ABOUT SPACE, and my place in it, obsessively. As a 26-year-old non-white woman, I aim to take up space, as the mantra goes, yet bump against the barriers of a world and a mind socialized against that. As a born-and-raised New Yorker, I’ve only ever known erratic stimulation from spaces: awe-inspiring one minute, horrifying the next. I now share space with someone I love. For many, it's an endlessly relatable experience in its contradictions, clothing-pile politics, and navigation. My side/your side. Please get away from me/please come closer. Who takes what call from where.

My most fearful sensation is getting lost in space, which I once described to a therapist as floating off the ground, untethered, into a dark abyss. My headspace has many rooms, some of which I fervently avoid and some I wholeheartedly lose myself in with the right synthy soundtrack on aimless walks around downtown Manhattan, feeling profound and cinematic.

I consider my surrounding space in this moment and think of Gestalt theory. That optical illusion prompting the eye to see only the figures that stand out: two profiles looking at each other, not the negative space in between. However, when we shift our focus to what’s in the middle, something new emerges: Rubin’s vase. It’s an interesting way to think about space. Only in shifting our focus to the absence in between do we see all that is contained.

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In “Your Body is a Space That Sees,” artist Lia Halloran created a series of large-scale cyanotype works — a photographic printing process producing a cyan-blue print. Well into the twentieth century, engineers were using the process as a simple way to copy drawings, thus originating the term “blueprints.”

The cyanotypes source the legacy of a group known as “Pickering’s Harem,” or later as the “Harvard Computers,” women who worked at the Harvard Observatory from the late 1800s through the first half of the twentieth century. They made significant impacts in the field of astronomy by using photographic glass plates to establish classification systems for the size, brightness, and chemical content of stars.

Their contributions to the lineage of astronomy were impactful, yet many times they were not included in its common history. The series offers the experience of a female-centric catalog of stellar objects in immersive cyanotype blue, and visually illuminates the curiosity and richness of the night sky through depictions of craters, comets, galaxies, and nebula.

Halloran’s research for this series was done in partnership with the Harvard University Archive, which houses the world’s largest collection of historic astronomical photographic plates. The artist identified specific plates and utilized these as a reference for her large paintings, and the names of the women are included in the titles of the works.

Halloran pays homage to Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s discovery of the universe's distance — instrumental to Edwin Hubble's now famous theory that the universe is expanding, to Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who found that most of the universe consisted of hydrogen, and Annie Jump Cannon, who set the classification system of stars still used today, known under the mnemonic “Oh Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me.”

Paintings of stellar objects referenced from photographic plates are made on semi-transparent film and then laid over paper that has been coated with light-sensitive emulsion and exposed under direct sunlight. The resulting work is a cyanotype print of the positive image in equal scale to its matching negative: a photographic print created without a camera.

This process mimics how early astronomical glass plates were created. And it’s multi-layered in meaning and technique: images of stars created by a star (our sun); paintings used to create a painting (light-sensitive emulsion painted out and exposed by another painting). Halloran’s technique is similar to cliché-verre, a process used by French painters in the early nineteenth century as a method of making a photograph by painting on glass as the negative.

Space is a thousand things. It’s an oxymoron — separating us, connecting us. It’s real, molecular compounds of matter in the air. And yet, it’s nothing more than a concept. This month at Departures, we explore this phenomenon of space in all its intangible, paradoxical forms. We look at iconic LA spaces through the lens of celebrated filmmaker Miranda July, trace the trends of modern space across the epic creations of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, and play Alice through the looking glass in two twin homes — mirror images of each other’s space. We make alien contact in outer space, mindfully consider our personal space, and talk to a photographer who’s been moving through space in search of something more. We find fantasy in the green space of Mexico’s mystical Las Pozas, and experience the future inside a restaurant called Contento — a groundbreakingly accessible space truly made for all.

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Our Contributors

Sophie Mancini Writer

Sophie Mancini is an editor at Departures. Born and raised in New York City, she holds a degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University and has a background as a writer in brand and editorial.

Lia Halloran Artist

Lia Halloran is an artist who creates projects that draw from scientific materials, nature, historical influences, and identities. She has participated in a wide range of interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists and architects, including an upcoming book with Nobel laureate Kip Thorne about the "warped side of the universe." She lives in Los Angeles, where she is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. She is also an associate professor in the art department at Chapman University, where her courses explore the intersection of art and science.

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