Art through a wormhole

Pasadena is a world-class arts city, with internationally renowned museums, including the Norton Simon, top-notch classical music venues in the Civic and Ambassador Auditoriums, and stellar theaters in the Pasadena Playhouse and the Theatre@Boston Court.

And twice a year, organizers of ArtNight Pasadena take it all to an even higher level by bringing together dozens of arts groups for an evening of free fun at venues throughout the city.
This Friday night marks the 20th ArtNight, and to honor the occasion the evening features an event that should make for literally out-of-this-world entertainment.

The Spitzer Center of Caltech has teamed up with the Williamson Gallery of Art Center College of Design to create an ambitious new exhibition of installation art called OBSERVE, which seeks to bridge the seemingly disparate worlds of art and science.

OBSERVE combines the works of five specially selected contemporary artists with the cutting-edge technology of the Spitzer Science Center and its infra-red deep-space Spitzer Orbiting Telescope, bringing the wonders of astronomy down to an entertaining and understandable level for the average person. According to Stephen Nowlin, director of the Williamson Gallery, the combination will be enlightening for all.

“The universe is 13 billion years old. We humans like to think we’re the center of the universe in our beliefs and religions, but when you understand the vastness of it you realize we are so little after all,” says Nowlin. “The artists are dealing with a lot of those things. I hope people walk away with a sense of awe and sense of complexity of the cosmos and how our understanding of it is still very much evolving.”

One of the five artists participating in a big way is Lynn Aldrich, a Texas native who earned her MFA from Art Center. Once selected, she and the other artists had several intensive meetings with the Spitzer scientists, absorbing the knowledge they’d derived about the universe and trying to figure out an appropriate artistic endeavor to encapsulate some of their unique discoveries.

Aldrich ultimately decided to work with the concept of wormholes — theorized invisible portals in space that can transport matter between different time periods and dimensions. She decided to create a physical wormhole that ultimately grew to be 34 feet long and five feet in diameter, big enough for people to walk through. It was constructed primarily out of sono tubes lined with fake fur and with lots of lights — black on one end of the portal and white on the other to dramatize the sense of journey.

“Space is full of weird things, and I thought it would be organized, but instead it’s full of anomalies and things that don’t work right the way we think they should,” says Aldrich. “This is incredibly heady stuff we’re exposed to and I think you’re profoundly impressed, and out of that the best jokes can reveal something to you about the mystery of the situation. My installation is made of cardboard lined with fake fur, is extremely low-tech, but my longing is that your senses are so involved, it’s sensual. I’m going to ask people to remove their shoes to walk through a soft, cushy wormhole.”

For her part, Caltech outreach scientist Dr. Michelle Thaller says that the OBSERVE project is something that’s not only been fun for the scientists, but potentially life-changing for those who visit it.

“As we met with the artists, we’d ask them things like ‘You just said you saw a galaxy 10 billion light years away, so how does that affect your view of reality?’ and it would start a whole conversation about how to view the world as artists and as scientists,” says Thaller, who noted Caltech first got involved during preparations for the exhibit during the popular citywide Skin Fest in 2007. “We hope we inspired the artists as they tried to communicate, and that their communication inspires the visitors to learn more and more themselves.”

OBSERVE’s opening reception takes place during ArtNight from 6 to 10 p.m. Friday and is located at the Williamson Gallery of the Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena. Call (626) 396-2200 or visit www.williamsongallery.net.