Exhibitions

SHADOWY SURFACES: COSMIC STARDUST

Wavelength Space / 854 McCallie Ave. May 1 - 30th (Reception: May 1 5:00pm - 8:00pm)

Angie To, Kathleen Thum

Everything we are made of has always existed. The carbon in our bones, the iron in our blood, the oxygen we breathe—all of it forged in the hearts of dying stars long before the earth took shape. We are, each of us, temporary arrangements of ancient matter: cosmic stardust given briefly to consciousness, to love, to loss, and then returned. It is from this understanding—at once humbling and luminous—that this exhibition unfolds.

Shadowy Surfaces: Cosmic Stardust brings together two bodies of work that approach time and precarity from different but deeply resonant directions. One practice reaching into geological time: coal and crude oil as both subject and material, the compressed remains of ancient life, drawn up from the earth, deep time burned into the present. The other turns toward intimate human time: a family gathered at the shore of a lake each summer, a husband’s absence carved into the water where he once swam, the body’s memory of buoyancy and warmth.

We share a preoccupation with what persists and what dissolves. Fossil fuels are millions of years of dense biological life compressed into darkness beneath the surface of the earth. A summer ritual at the water’s edge is time made ephemeral—a week each year that holds both everything and its own unraveling. In both cases, we are reckoning with a geological epoch shaped by human activity, and the existential condition of being human in a world that exceeds us, that predates us, and that will outlast us.

Grief and climate grief are not so different. Both require us to metabolize the irrevocable. Both force a reckoning with what we have taken for granted and what we stand to lose. Both call into question the orderly futures we had imagined for ourselves...