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Krista Kelley Walsh

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Things Unseen

Things Unseen
Things Unseen

Site Specific installation Over look Gallery Phipps Art Center Hudson Wisconsin

Things Unseen
Things Unseen
Things Unseen
Things Unseen
Things Unseen detail
Things Unseen detail
Things Unseen : prism detail
Things Unseen : prism detail
Things Unseen : parking lot view
Things Unseen : parking lot view

Things Unseen | Media List


Statement

1) What aspect(s) of science does your work focus on? What inspired you to choose this focus?
I love all aspects of science , but in a really simple, almost child like way. I consider myself a naive scientist , much like naive artists whom I greatly respect for their commitment and passion. I enjoy my own rudimentary postulations and concocting visually pleasing experiments . I peruse high minded science theory but my inpiraration and knowledge come primarily from the children’s room at the library! I have worked with a small range of natural phenomenon but light and vision are my favorites and find their way into most of my work in one way or another. I am driven by the questions of perception: basically how we see to understand and moreover misunderstand the world we live in.
2) What does your art offer the viewer in terms of a way of seeing or experiencing that might be different from our ordinary approaches to science?
My goal is to create a moment of wonder. I ask the viewer to stay present to beauty and mystery. And perhaps, unlike science, to linger there rather than to search immediately for meaning, explanation, facts or “truth”. Is wonder itself the truth? Did Einstein elude to this this when he said “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”?
3) Did you have any discoveries while making your work? Any special challenges?
What I appreciate the most about this installation is how the fallibility of it is also it’s most curious and interesting aspects. When the sun doesn’t shine the refraction and spectral affect is not present. Is this a failure of the installation? No, it is an opportunity to view the remaining more subtle phenomenon occurring : the world warped and distorted in the lens created by the water in the vases, the subtlety of the shadows their negative and positive shape or the repeated reflection of the vases in the window panes. But moreover no, because to me in the absence of direct sunlight I think about the “non-visible” and contemplate the wonder of illusive visual phenomenon, like a total eclipse of the sun and the arora borealis or my favorite concept, presence and absence: the fact that stars always shine even when we can’t see them in the daylight sky.

Reviews



Christina Schmid http://phippsart.wordpress.com/

Krista Kelly Walsh’s installation Things Unseen overlooks the St. Croix River valley and, like Armington’s time line, asks us to treasure the marvelous in the ordinary. With its deceptively simple array of water-filled glass vases on the windowsills, Things Unseen entices us to pause, sit, look closely, and realize just how much there is to look at: the stunning daytime view of the river valley, the play of broken and refracted light and shadow, and, once we peek through the vases as lenses, a world warped by the concavities and convexities of the glass surfaces.
Rather than tell us a story, Things Unseen invites us to make up our own narratives of discovery, as each subtle shift in position vis-à-vis the vases leads to new surprises and literally makes visible things previously unseen. We may choose to stay in the realm of optics and reflect on why we see what we see, how lenses and light angles combine to produce these effects. On the other hand, we may venture into metaphor and ponder the importance of adopting different points of view and how doing that may change our very view of the world. Or, we may simply contemplate Walsh’s mindful arrangement of these deceptively simple materials—nothing but glass, sunlight, water—and, perhaps, play a little by ducking this way and that: after all, “if people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”