As Seen From the Surface
Exhibition Text

By Denise Markonish

“…it is essential to take a wide and deep view and look far in every direction; for you must remember that the aggregate of things is unfathomable, and realize that a single sky is so very small, so infinitesimally small a part of the whole universe…” Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, First-century BC

Katie Bullock is an artist who notices things – the small moments, exemplifying Mary Oliver’s phrase, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” Her Didactic Chart, 2013 was an exercise in, albeit futilely, understanding the universe. Made in residence at the Siena Art Institute, Italy (a region paramount to the wonder discoveries of the Renaissance), Didactic Chart is a drawing and an event horizon, with a black hole-like center surrounded by small illustrations culled from books – the curvature of the earth, the passage of an eclipse, etc. This work would serve as the launching of a life’s work aiming to capture the wonders of the infinitesimal, the overlooked; an aggregate of the unfathomable.

Since Didactic Chart, Bullock has amassed an archive of thousands of “wonder moments” – photographs and iPhone videos searchable on her website – which lays the groundwork for video installations and drawings. Watching these videos is infectious, they are fleeting, just like the phenomena they depict, but on top of that, we occasionally hear Bullock’s voice saying: “what is happening?” “wow,” and other hushed gasps, conjuring what she refers to as “the tiptoe of expectation.” In recording these moments, she captures the memory of their discovery and reminds us to look at the world around us, unabashedly. This deeply felt archive recalls Walter Benjamin labeling such repositories as “shelters.” That is exactly what Bullock’s Moment Archive is, it gives her and us permission to shelter in awe, to search categories such as “looking at the sky” or “things that happened in the dark.”

For As Seen From the Surface, Bullock brings her archive to life – projecting small videos interspersed with diagrammatic drawings drawn from books and her videos/photographs, all in a geometric pattern that references the Didactic Chart. These galleries function as both observatory and library and works will be added throughout the exhibition’s run. Together the elements form a new cabinet of curiosities for the infinitesimal. There is symmetry in seeing the videos and drawings together as they tell a story of experience followed by the sometimes fruitless need to understand what just occurred. The shimmering graphite of the drawings catch the light, while the vellum’s transparency and buoyancy allow them to flutter as we pass by, like a leaf shaking in the wind. To complement these subtly didactic moments, Bullock occasionally adds text to her videos that may also feature in the drawings. One clip of an oil slick on a puddle (what Vladimir Nabokov once dubbed “asphalt’s parakeet”) is accompanied by the words, “In the microcosm of her own visual world she worshiped the macrocosm of the universe.”

The inclusion of “she” here offers the opportunity for Bullock to tell us her stories and to merge the personal with the universal. Previously her texts came from field guides and science books, but now her own observations intervene, such as “She stopped using one journal for ‘poetry’ and another for ‘facts.’” With this phrase, Bullock invites us in and reminds us, as Wallace Stevens wrote: “It is not every day that the world arranges itself into a poem.”

-Denise Markonish