Ala Ebtekar, Thirty-Six Views Of The Moon (from The San Jose Museum Of Art)

Ala Ebtekar, Thirty-Six Views of the Moon (from the San Jose Museum of Art)

Cyanotype prints on found book pages exposed to moonlight.

Thirty-six Views of the Moon is a collection of night exposures, left from dusk till dawn and exposed by moonlight on book pages from texts referencing the moon and night sky spanning the last ten centuries. Working with photographic negatives of the Moon from the Lick Observatory archives in Northern California and treating each book page with Potassium ferricyanide and Ammonium ferric citrate (cyanotype) to make the surface of the page light-sensitive, the pages are then exposed overnight by the UV-light emitted by the moon. The work takes its cue from a poem by Omar Khayyam that imagines us as the objects of the Moon’s omnipresent gaze and, in response, produces a vignette of windows on the Moon that abstract the typical celestial gaze, merging galaxy with ground to collapse space and time. (McEvoy Foundation for the Arts)