Bold installations tackle outer space

Katie Paterson, In Another Time, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre. On until June 22.
Earth Moon Earth by Katie Paterson, part of the In Another Time exhibition at Warwick Arts Centre.Earth Moon Earth by Katie Paterson, part of the In Another Time exhibition at Warwick Arts Centre.
Earth Moon Earth by Katie Paterson, part of the In Another Time exhibition at Warwick Arts Centre.

There’s nothing more profound than outer space with its vast distances and giant galaxies.

But it has largely been ignored as a subject for art - until now, than is, because Katie Paterson is boldly going where others fear to tread. Through extensive research and the exercise of her imagination, she has produced a set of installations that are as wide in scope as they are restrained and discrete in their modes of presentation.

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Which ironically makes the echoing halls of the blacked-out Mead a challenging environment for such ephemeral pockets of interest. A full-sized grand piano seems lost in space as it mechanically plays Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, eerily modified by being bounced off the moon itself.

Things fare better in a second room where a comprehensive and ongoing archive of 35mm slides showing variations in the levels of darkness in outer space are presented in a beautifully constructed, horizontally extended light-box that will take a lifetime to fill.

This has more impact, but for sheer visual appeal that matches its conceptual appeal, nothing beats a wall-sized display of the letters that Paterson has sent and continues to send to an American professor each time she learns of the death of a star. As an understated expression of pathos and regret, it’s as good as it gets.

Peter McCarthy

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