From group exhibition: Energy Futures Portfolio Project, 2023-2024 | coordinator Eveline Kolijn
Cut acrylic sheet; Inkjet print on BFK Rives paper, shelf, 13”x19” each [edition of 25]
In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleyev, a Russian chemist and teacher, advanced the bold hypothesis of elemental periodicity, claiming it came to him in a dream. After days of feverishly labouring to solve the riddle of the classification of the chemical elements, until then clouded in alchemy and mystery, he awoke with a vision and quickly jotted down the figures and columns that became the foundation of the modern periodic table. 118 elements now complete the table, a tidy summation of matter, organized into metals, non-metals, lanthanides, actinides, metalloids, halogens, and noble gases. That this finite, codified list represents all matter, the contents of which combine into all the substances in the universe with neither loss nor gain, was the catalyst for a 25 print edition commissioned for Energy Futures Portfolio Project.
Envisioning energy began with looking straight up, pointing my camera at the sky. Rayleigh scattering of sunlight into sublime blues and changing hues gave way to the contested skies of surveillance, orbiting satellites, warfare, bombing raids, terror. Terror from the air – especially in an era in which the main target of warfare is the environment, or the very conditions necessary to sustain life – is intimately tied to energy futures. By superimposing a transparent grid of the periodic table onto a photograph of clouds adrift without end, these images are bound together, the contained and the uncontainable, the known and the unknowable.
