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WHITNEY MALLETT
Dana Karwas’s cosmic eye and the sensitive instruments that color time
The namesake of Foucault’s Pendulum is the 19th-century French physicist Léon, who staged a demo of diurnal motion at Paris’s Panthéon in 1851. And yet, how Dana Karwas incorporates this pendulum’s lineage into her new exhibition, Thirty Six Point Eight Hours, I do think of the other Foucault, Michel—especially The Order of Things, his pivotal meditation on how we organize knowledge. With her exhibition, Karwas stages encounters intended to make us not only recalibrate the relationships we have to scientific imagery, but also examine the broader interdependence between perception, orientation, and apprehension. How does what you see determine how you understand where you are?
The basic premise of Foucault’s Pendulum is that if a large, heavy pendulum is allowed to swing freely in any direction, as it swings, the plane of its swing slowly rotates — not because the pendulum is twisting, but because the Earth is turning beneath it. In Karwas’s exhibition, she hangs a smaller mechanized version of this pendulum from the ceiling of the gallery, and embeds a camera on its end. Her seeing-machine is positioned over an image of outer space taken with another, the James Webb Space Telescope, the premier telescope of our time, a successor to Hubble, capable of seeing so much more of the spectrum of infrared light beyond human vision. Peering through cosmic dust to distant galaxies (and back in time roughly 13.5 billion years), it translates movement into color—redshift occurs when galaxies are moving away from us, causing their light to stretch towards longer wavelengths; blueshift happens when galaxies are moving towards us, compressing their light into shorter wavelengths. The eye of Karwas’s pendulum swings back and forth across this data-dense image, generating a range of output she’s then incorporated into the exhibition, hanging on the adjacent wall.
The logic of the funhouse mirror is a recurring thread through the show. There’s, for example, a more literal mirror Karwas has made inspired by a Reversible Destiny Foundation (Arakawa and Madeline Gins) archival document showing two people waving across a chasm: “~SPACETIMEMASSENERGYWAVEHELLO ~” reads the caption. Karwas’s melted and warped response produces a reflection that resists a perfect physical mapping. There’s this impossible space indexed by the image you’re looking at in the mirror.
Throughout her show, Karwas creates a tension between the physical and the perceived, using scientific frameworks to scratch at the gap between seeing and understanding. At its core, the exhibition is auto-hermeneutic, curious about how we might recalibrate, reorient, and offset, (and how that will play out on the level of bodies in space across time) when interpreting its installation.