Exoplanets
Artist Statement
With these paintings, I am working at the edge of knowledge where science disintegrates into conjecture.
In the last few years, our understanding of the universe took massive leaps forward with the success of NASA's Kepler mission. An orbiting space telescope using new planet-hunting techniques found the fingerprints of thousands of exoplanets around neighboring stars. Using this data, we can infer planetary attributes such as mass and orbital distance, and even the color and likely composition of these exoplanets. However, we cannot image these distant worlds directly. They are simply too far away and too small to get more than a blurry globular image of the largest and nearest of them.
As an artist, I'm not bound by the constraints of the scientific method and am free to extrapolate, concoct, and blatantly fabricate the appearance of these worlds. I can go where science cannot. I can lie, knowing that, sometime in the future when our imaging technology improves, my lies will be exposed as we juxtapose my manufactured truth with the objective reality of our planetary cousins.