Arms in Space

A couple of weeks ago I heard the artist Mungo Thomson speak at SFAI.  He talked about numerous performative and installation pieces. He talked about making an orchestra play cricket sounds for far too long, and making chimes on coat racks in a museum to annoy and charm the guests. But what interested me the most was how he possibly was given loads of money to create magnificently large museum murals of inverted Hubble Telescope images he found for free on the internet. I was a little bothered by this but intrigued to pursue my own appropriated work in correspondence with my personal archive of photographs. 

So I chose an arm photo I made recently and composited it with a number of (not inverted, I like the original colors) images of space.  Here are a few, starting with the Carina Nebula Pillar (and arm), the Butterfly Nebula (and arm), and a globular star cluster omega cantauri (and arm), and last but not least, bok globules in star forming region (and arm).  Maybe like Mungo, I am drawn to what is at the farthest expanses of our reality, beyond our understanding: sometimes curious, sometimes breathtaking, and always rather incomprehensible. 

---