2019 CAROL PRUSA
Carol Prusa is a visual alchemist whose work harnesses cosmic chaos and makes invisible forces materialize before our eyes. Drawing with actual silver and painting with powdered steel, Prusa's use of materials defies expectations. Several of the paintings and prints in Dark Light are dedicated to pioneering female astronomers with whom Prusa feels a strong kinship. Quintessence contains an abstract video that conjures the otherworldly light and color effects the artist witnessed during a recent solar eclipse. Other artworks are internally lit, and many feature tightly controlled passages of geometric or representational precision that give way to beautifully nebulous, freeform space-dust patterns.
What is Dark Light about? The mysteries of the cosmos is the short answer, but it is an answer that probably obscures as much as it illuminates. The phrase “the mysteries of the cosmos” points the mind in one of two directions—science or spirituality. Depending on one's personal feelings about those subjects, these ways of framing Prusa's art could either instill a false sense of confidence that we "get it" without having to spend much time with the art; or, make us associate Dark Light with things we find baffling or inscrutable, causing us to tune it out completely. Either way, we would miss what is truly amazing about the work, which requires neither scientific knowledge nor spiritual commitment but only a willingness to look and see.
Although Prusa gets much of her inspiration from the sciences of astrophysics, meteorology, and optics, she also incorporates art-making processes from her study of Russian Orthodox and Tibetan Buddhist art-making traditions. As Prusa explains: "I need to stir myself up with thoughts that are bigger than me and read about things that are beyond me, and then reach for them in my work." The sense of certainty one sometimes encounters in religious discourse is anathema to Prusa, who consciously pushes herself and her artwork into the hazy shadowlands between chaos and order, cultivating states of profound unknowing. The scientific method, which produces a perennially incomplete, provisionally constructed model of reality, may seem more in line with Prusa's creative pursuit of uncertainty. However, the task of science is not to bask in cosmic mysteries, but to solve them. Greater knowledge is always the goal, no matter how provisional or incomplete that knowledge may be. Prusa underscores this way of thinking: "I don't make work to accomplish anything or answer anything." Prusa finds meaning in the nebulous, floating stardust of mystery itself.
Although I have been following her work for over a decade, Prusa still manages to surprise me, as she did when she told me recently that one of her favorite musical genres is atmospheric black metal. If "atmospheric black metal" were an actual, material substance—imagine glittering clouds of black powder—it would be an excellent way to describe many of the works in Dark Light. After all, Prusa uses literal heavy metals—black iron oxide, titanium, silver, and powdered steel—to create her predominantly black and grey-toned paintings, which shimmer like stardust and are full of "atmospheric" effects. Prusa's metallic pigments are seductive, mysterious, otherworldly, and majestic. Unlike atmospheric black metal music, however, Prusa's "atmospheric black metal" paintings are not gloomy or bleak. In fact, it is best to set aside all the usual Western notions of "darkness" as a symbol of sadness, hopelessness, death, evil, black magic, and so forth, if we wish to understand Prusa's body of work on its own terms.
In Dark Light, Prusa explores two unrelated phenomena, both called "dark light" — neither of which has anything to do with doom or gloom. The first kind of "dark light," from nineteenth century optics, is a visual illusion that occurs under low-light conditions, whereby people sometimes perceive non-existent particles of luminous "visual noise" glowing within the darkest of shadows. The second usage of the phrase "dark light," from the world of contemporary astrophysics, refers to a theoretical force that interacts with dark matter. Neither dark light nor dark matter are dark in color; they are only "dark" in the sense of being imperceptible to humans. The "dark light" of optics is unreal, even though people believe they can see it, whereas the "dark light" of astrophysics is real (at least according to popular theory), although no one can see it.
Luna (Guardian) offers a good entrée into the phenomenon of "dark light" in the optical illusion sense of the term. At face value, Prusa has drawn an image of a tree in silverpoint with Düreresque virtuosity; but the real subject of Luna is not the tree but the faint moonlight in which it is bathed (hence the title), as well as the illusory "dark light" we experience when trying to focus on subtle details among the soft, lunar shadows. There is no pure black in Luna, as there is in some of the solar eclipse paintings in the exhibition. Instead of black, Luna offers a low-contrast palette of charcoal greys, speckled with lighter particles of "visual noise." These particles simulate the "dark light" illusion—also known as Eigengrau, or "intrinsic grey"—whereby shadowy objects perceived under low-light conditions appear to buzz with energetic fields of grey luminosity. Prusa juxtaposes an ornate, wreathlike border of bright titanium white patterns against the low-contrast metallic pigments of the central image, ensuring that her tree remains comparatively faint and dim no matter how many spotlights one might aim at the artwork.
Prusa takes the Eigengrau illusion further in other Dark Light artworks. In Umbra and Corona, for instance, Prusa dispenses with the central image entirely. Umbra's ornate, wreathlike border opens to an otherwise empty field of darkness, a starless sky of speckled Eigengrau. Umbra is darker than Luna but still not pure black. When viewed up close, the slightly luminous speckles that float in the midst of the starless darkness resemble a delicate patina of water spots on a glass window, but seen from a standard viewing distance their faint outlines dissolve into a soft visual buzz. The effect is strong enough to make us aware that we are perceiving luminosity in the midst of darkness, but it is subtle enough not to draw undue attention to the surface of the artwork. Corona has a similar Eigengrau effect in its large circular dark center, but instead of the crisply delineated border that enwreathes Umbra, the border of Corona gradually fades into or out of the mysteriously luminous darkness. In these works, Prusa turns our attention away from the objects of visual perception and redirects it to the perceptual process itself. They are part of a tradition of artworks that toy with visual perception and illusion, which would include works by Bridget Riley, Larry Bell, Anish Kapoor, and even Richard Artschwager's use of rubberized horsehair to make solid sculptures that appear "blurry" from a distance.
Given her capacity to make magic from shadows, it is no surprise that Prusa identifies as an umbraphile, one who travels the world to experience solar eclipses. It is a passion that has taken the artist as far afield as Chile and Nebraska and inspired many of the works in the present exhibition. Quintessence, a kaleidoscope-patterned dome painting, contains a small, circular, kaleidoscope-patterned video art element in the oculus at the apex of the dome. Prusa created the video sequence for Quintessence from footage of a total solar eclipse she recorded in 2017, preserving the light and color effects she experienced during the course of the eclipse—effects she later described as "strangely dramatic and euphoric—like being surrounded by another energy, an energy never felt before." The longer one spends gazing at the rapidly transforming star shapes at the center of Quintessence, the more colors one sees in the video, but also the less detail one sees in the surrounding dome, which starts to dissolve into a luminous grey mist. It is an optical illusion that captures the feeling of "everything else dropping away," which Prusa experienced during the maximum stage of the total eclipse in a moment that umbraphiles like her call "totality."
In all of Prusa's works, order emerges slowly out of chaos, light from darkness, pattern from void. No matter how fine the detail or how seemingly perfect the symmetry of her final compositions, Prusa always begins with experimental, process-oriented methods that introduce elements of chaos or unpredictability into the work. In several of the recent Dark Light paintings, Prusa allows more of the initial "chaos" to remain in the finished works than she ever has in the past. At times, we may feel as if we are traveling to a point in time just a few milliseconds before or after the Big Bang, and we are witnessing the cosmos coming into being.
Prusa's notion of art making as a process, where order composes itself from chaos, has surprising art-historical roots. In the early 90's, Prusa studied fifteenth-century Russian Orthodox icon painting techniques under a master icon painter at Naropa University. At the time, Prusa's work tended to engage more directly in social commentary, so her primary interest in learning traditional icon painting was to make what she describes as "subversive, feminist" Madonna and Child paintings that would be a critique of religion and patriarchy. Unexpectedly, however, her earnest engagement with these late-medieval painting techniques led to a deep appreciation for the concepts that underpinned the icon-painting process, which forever altered the way Prusa thought about painting and continues to inform her working methods to this day.
Because fifteenth-century icon painters conceived of their process as an echo of divine creation, they began each of their paintings with what Prusa describes as an "open cosmological field" reflecting the original pre-creation state when "the world was without form, and void." Before painting any images—which these early icon painters saw as an ego-driven process that could interfere with the creative will of God—they would first "float" unmixed pigments onto a wet substrate, allowing the materials to settle naturally according to their own intrinsic properties. Prusa's connection to the fifteenth-century Russian icon painting lineage is instructive. As with the icon painters, she employs randomness to initiate a generative "cosmological field" from which order and symmetry emerge. The thought of order emerging in the universe after the Big Bang, or even star clusters being born from the dusty chaos of nebulas today, is as mind-boggling and as humbling for Prusa as the Christian creation story was for Russian icon painters six centuries ago.
Prusa begins many of her paintings with ground graphite washes, allowing the materials to flow and settle in unpredictable ways. Even in Galaxias Kyklos, the suite of copperplate etchings (her first foray into etching), a smoky soap ground on copperplate was etched and printed to create an "open cosmological field" before printing the etched incised hard-ground plates on top. To make Dark Light (Elegy for Rebecca Elson), Prusa poured countless layers of acrylic resin containing powdered steel and black iron oxide onto the center of the canvas. This caused tendrils of pale metallic pigment to course through the surrounding blackness as streaks of lightning through storm clouds, as white veins through black marble, or—as the title suggests—as dark light through dark matter. Although Prusa later "filled in" the four edges of the canvas with a billowing pattern of stylized silver and white dust clouds, she kept most of the seven-foot painting in its more primordial state. The massive, circular void is interrupted only by the lightning-like veins that radiate outward from the central, unknowable darkness. Gazing into the void, I asked Prusa what she thought of Kazimir Malevich's Black Circle or Anish Kapoor's Black Hole. "I wish I could make something that simple," she replied, "but just keeping myself from filling in the center of this piece was difficult enough!"
Considering Prusa's natural inclination to fill the "cosmic voids" of her paintings with meticulously detailed all-over patterns, Dark Light (Elegy for Rebecca Elson) displays remarkable restraint and vulnerability. By leaving the painting in a state she would have considered "unfinished" just a few years ago, she allows herself to teeter on the edge of chaos and control. It also gives the work a dramatic visual impact. Slightly larger than human size, the void, streaked with dark light, seems capable of subsuming us. We may feel what the French call l'appel du vide — the call of the void — and the urge to leap.
Rebecca Elson was a theoretical astrophysicist whose research focused on dark matter and who died of lymphoma in 1999 at the age of 39. Elson was also an accomplished poet. In "Dark Matter II," Elson uses the concept of "dark light" from astrophysics as a metaphor for the many invisible ways that humans influence one another. "Each of us," she writes, "point-like, luminous / Bends the path of those whose lives we touch." Prusa said that in making Dark Light, she wanted to "give structure to something that can't be seen" — namely, the movement of dark light through dark matter, which scientific illustrators tend to represent as luminous plasmatic or lightning-like filament patterns similar to the gracefully intertwining tendrils of luminous metallic pigments that radiate outward from the dark center of Prusa's painting. Prusa's dedicatory subtitle, Elegy for Rebecca Elson, encourages an interpretation of "dark light" beyond the literalism of scientific illustration. Prusa's web of silvery electric plasma evokes Elson's own notion of human interconnectedness. The painting may first appear to be a black hole, an elegiac absence, but in fact it is a positive portrait of Elson as a confluence of thoughts and energies which continue to interact in many incalculable ways with the universe in which she moved. Traces of ourselves can “bend” or affect the memory of others and their life paths in subtle, or sometimes great ways.
Cosmic Web (for the Harvard Computers) is an internally-lit, dome-shaped artwork dedicated to fourteen of the pioneering female astronomers known as the Harvard Computers, whose discoveries at the Harvard Observatory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries greatly expanded human understanding of the cosmos. Prusa represents each scientist as a tower of translucent floral or cloudlike organic forms. Collectively, the fourteen translucent towers join to form a ring around the perimeter of the dome, similar to the rings of smoke, fire, or flower petals that often encircle the bodies of Tibetan Buddhist deities in traditional thangka paintings. (Prusa studied Tibetan painting in the mid-1990s, and the influence shows.) The top of each astronomer's tower contains an illuminated oculus, like the opening at the top of an observatory, and thin beams of light radiate upward and outward from each opening. The beams intersect with one another in the cosmic blackness at the center of the dome, coalescing as the "crossed streams" of proton accelerator beams do in the Ghostbusters movies.
In Prusa's Cosmic Web, the intersecting beams form a mathematically perfect, kaleidoscopic pattern of concentric fourteen-pointed stars, which glow, literally, due to its internal light. If the individual beams represent each astronomer's quest to map the unknown, then the brilliant, kaleidoscopic star pattern at the center represents unity, synergy, and collective strength. Astronomy, like art, can be a lonely profession and the work of an astronomer — at least in the nineteenth century — was "as dull as that of a bookkeeper," as one of the early directors of the Harvard Observatory once confessed to a Boston Herald reporter. Fortunately, for the Harvard Computers, the hard work paid off; and it is because of their steady, diligent, solitary labor that we now know the universe is exponentially larger than anyone had ever dreamed possible.
Prusa's studio practice is equally steady, diligent, and solitary. Her art expands our perceptions and makes us feel more curious, and perhaps even a bit wiser, than we were before we encountered it. As works of visual art, the works in Dark Light disrupt our ordinary field of vision, transporting us to a space of profound unknowing. Dark Light reawakens our sense of wonder and sends glittering particles of cosmic mystery into the grey matter of our minds.