On a latest night time in San Francisco, amid the phosphorescent glow of Fisherman’s Wharf and the Bay Bridge, the artist Ala Ebtekar got down to have a dialog with the moon and stars.
Or a minimum of his work did. An assortment of plates, blooming with what at first may seem like mould, had been arrayed excessive up on a roof at Fort Mason, moon-and-star-bathing. It was a particular night time for such an exercise—the moon, which had been full and radiant simply hours earlier than, was slowly reworking right into a crescent throughout a partial lunar eclipse.
“We’re basically attempting to work with the sunshine emitted from the moon, and probably the celebs, to beginning the works,” Ebtekar mentioned as we stood within the chilly night time air excessive above the Bay. (That “probably” was as a result of not many stars had been peeking out.) He defined that what appeared to untrained eyes just like the patterns of mould was in actual fact a photographic destructive of a deep-sky picture taken by the Hubble House Telescope, capturing 3.2 billion years of cosmic historical past. The splotches and splatters on the plates had been, in actual fact, stars and galaxies, slowly making a print over the course of the night.
Ebtekar works with cyanotypes—a camera-less type of pictures invented by the astronomer John Herschel in 1842, during which paper is handled with iron salts and uncovered to ultraviolet mild to create photographs in sensible blue. Whereas most cyanotypes are created with daylight, Ebtekar typically works with lunar mild, on this case brushing rice paper with potassium ferricyanide and ammonium ferric citrate and pairing it with a deep-sky destructive, then leaving it uncovered from nightfall till daybreak, in order that the lunar and starlight reveal the print.
Ebtekar, a Bay Space native and school member at Stanford College, has made work involving the moon for years. He’s impressed, partly, by a line in a poem by the Eleventh-century Persian poet and astronomer Omar Khayyam: “Drink wine and have a look at the moon and consider all of the civilisations the moon has seen passing by.” The road helped immediate Ebtekar’s guide Thirty-Six Views of the Moon, which incorporates cyanotype contact prints made with pages torn from books that point out the moon or night time sky prior to now thousand years.
Ala Abkatar stands on the roof along with his slowly creating cyanotypes Courtesy Arion Press
However on this March night, Ebtekar was standing on a roof at Fort Mason underneath the auspices of Arion Press as its 2025 King Artist in Residence. Arion, which just lately celebrated its fiftieth 12 months as a writer, is the final US press making books completely by hand, from its kind foundry to its hand bindery. This previous October, it moved from the Presidio to a brand new facility in Fort Mason; Ebtekar is the primary artist in residence in its new spot. Whereas Arion works with artists on each title (latest collaborators embrace Kiki Smith, Kenturah Davis, Marcel Dzama and Sandow Birk), the residency is an opportunity for artists to work on website to create a fine-press guide utilizing the writer’s centuries-old tools.
Ebtekar’s work for Arion is a part of his Dusk sequence, which responds to a 1941 Isaac Asimov brief story of the identical identify that describes a planet that sees darkness solely as soon as each 2,000 years. “There have been so a few years since darkness that individuals do not actually know what to anticipate,” Ebtekar defined. Within the story, scientists and astronomers speculate in regards to the massive occasion, however when it occurs, “all of them go mad, and I like that”, Ebtekar added.
He loves the story’s conclusion, partly due to the “connection between insanity and potential enlightenment” seen in lots of mystic traditions, he defined, but in addition as a result of it’s proof of a reframing. Dusk on this planet “sort of breaks their anthropocentric view”, Ebtekar mentioned. And it affords a shift in scale—lastly seeing the celebs reveals the individuals of the planet simply how a lot else is on the market.
Ebtekar’s work—exhibited just lately on the Asian Artwork Museum of San Francisco, the Third Line in Dubai and the Brooklyn Museum—typically includes these shifts in scale in the direction of lengthy durations. He tends to work in an area the place centuries-old methods (together with bookmaking, illumination and Persian coffeehouse portray) meet trendy science.
The undertaking with Arion, which is able to come out in November, will see the prints made through the 13 March eclipse seem alongside the textual content from Asimov in addition to anthotypes (one other type of camera-less pictures, this time utilizing vegetation). The guide will even embrace a citation from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay Nature, which impressed Asimov’s Dusk. Ebtekar sees his personal work as a response to Asimov responding to Emerson—one other dialogue, just like the one between Ebtekar’s artwork and the night time sky.
