Client: Open Sesame Garden | The Beaverbrook Art Gallery

Overview

Visiting StarCraft (2023) are powder coated steel versions of 100 Closest Stars, freestanding sculptures for gardens. “Appearing in a variety of colors—from vibrant scarlet, vivid blue, and bright green to Day-Glo yellow—each “star” is rendered using the astronomical data that locates it in the night sky, a process that involves a form of spatial analysis called Voronoi geometry, which produces the unfamiliar, faceted shapes.

Like their smaller thermoplastic cousins, these steel sculptures are brightly colored in fluorescent orange, neon yellow, and sky blue. While their spindly forms seem weightless, almost without substance, they fill most of the space in the gallery, routing viewers around in a geometric dance. Each form is unique, its angles and facets reflecting the shifting position that it holds vis-à-vis our planet as we plummet through the depths of space in our expanding universe. Solid yet vertiginous, “100 Closest Stars” evokes both the immensity of space and the intimacy of an object that can easily be held in one’s hand, or—through mathematics—in one’s mind. ” – Ray Cronin, Sculpture Magazine

Goals

"Though the sculptures sit solidly on the ground, one can’t help but see them as though they were floating in space, crystalline bubbles visible only at their edges."
-Ray Cronin, Sculpture Magazine

Process

This project originated in the GIS community in New York City. While studying spatial analysis and visualization at Pratt I attended a GEONYC lecture about Voronoi geometry and the awesome potential, as Stuart Lynn puts it, of NASA’s open-source database. 3D tessellation governed by the concept of a boundary, I recognized Voronoi's potential for sculpture immediately. While preparing the files for EurekaTec to make the full series of 100 Closest Stars (2021) I found three anomalies. 'We can’t print that’, they said. I scaled them up in my studio instead, in steel.

The steel lengths of each star are cut to length in my studio upstate. Holes are drilled in the ends to accommodate steel wire. The object is hung from the ceiling and manipulated and welded in place, and powder coated in the city. The original goal was to depict outliers (three stars that were too large to be 3D–printed) I love them so much that the complete series needs to be made in this way. Four sculptures have been made in this way, as a proof of concept.

Additional Information

Next steps involve working with a client or private collector to produce the entire series for a public, private or institutional collection. "No words." -Resja Campfens