CUT PAPER (SPACE JUNK) 


Constellations​ ​of​ ​cut,​ ​painted​ ​paper​ ​are​ ​installed​ ​directly​ ​into​ ​the​ ​wall​ ​with​ ​pins,​ referencing​ ​natural​ ​specimens and creating an architecture of shadows. Works in a recent series are composed of objects drawn from the mythology of specific constellations, celestial movement, and inventories of daily life. This work is informed by research into how space junk is rapidly accumulating in the earth's atmosphere, out of sight like garbage in landfills but not gone. 


NOTES:

Inactive satellites, the upper stages of launch vehicles, discarded bits left over from separation, and even frozen clouds of water and tiny flecks of paint all remain in orbit high above Earth's atmosphere. When one piece collides with another, even more debris is released. Over 21,000 pieces of space trash larger than 4 inches (10 centimeters) and half a million bits of junk between 1 cm and 10 cm are estimated to circle the planet. And the number is only predicted to go up. 
- Nola Taylor Redd, Space Junk: Tracking and Removing Orbital Debris

I saw two shooting stars last night, so I wished on them but they were only satellites, is it wrong to wish on space hardware...
- Billy Bragg, A New England

I am old. Everything is old. The planet is old. & there's no way to get rid of all this plastic. & we're shooting the shit into space. I used to want to go into space. For what? To see all this garbage floating by.
- Yuji Agematsu

There'd be time for that later; time to throw condensed-milk cans in the proud Martian canals; time for copies of the New York Times to blow and caper and rustle across the line gray Martian sea-bottoms; time for banana peels and picnic papers in the fluted, delicated ruins of the old Martian valley towns. Plenty of time for that. And he gave a small inward shiver at the thought.
- Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

It does not prevent me from having a terrible need of, shall I say the word - of religion - then I go outside in the night to paint the stars.
- Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo

Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky. This is where stories began...
​- John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

I really think the word "constellation" is useful... because it acknowledges it's artifice, it's totally a fiction, the constellation doesn't objectively exist, it's a way of interpreting mere reality in order to produce meaning, and you can have more than one constellation drawn from the same number of stars.
- Ben Lerner, conversation NYPL

A very ancient constellation, Canis Major is the larger of the the two hunting dogs used by Orion. Within the constellation can be found the brightest star in the night sky Sirius, also known as the "Dog Star". The name Sirius is derived from the Greek word Greek word seirios (Σείριος) meaning ‘searing’ or ‘scorching’. It was thought that during the hot months of summer when this star is above the horizon during the day time its heat was added to the sun. This is the origin of the term "the dog days of summer".
- Astronomy Facts, MSU Physics and Astronomy webpage

The aircraft rotates about its logitudinal axis, shifting the equinoxes slowly west. Our system of measure is anchored by the apparent daily motion of stars that no longer exist. When the reader comes to, the writer hits him again. Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms. This is not your captain speaking, thinks the captain. A magnetic field reversal turns our fire friendly. Fleeing populations leaving their bread unleavened, their lines unbroken.
​- Ben Lerner, Angle of Yaw

Do you remember how the night sky of Ischia horrified me? You all said how beautiful it was, but I couldn’t. I smelled an odor of rotten eggs, eggs with a greenish-yellow yolk inside the white and inside the shell, a hard-boiled egg cracked open. I had in my mouth poisoned egg stars, their light had a white, gummy consistency, it stuck to your teeth, along with the gelatinous black of the sky, I crushed it with disgust, I tasted a crackling of grit. Am I clear? Am I making myself clear?
- Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

We in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel... a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication... overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the - the stars up here in the - in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it.
- Werner Herzog, The Burden of Dreams
  - William Irwin Thompson, Rapunzel: Cosmology Lost
 


Tantivy's desk is neat, Slothrop's is a godawful mess. It hasn't been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash... a scatter of paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts and crumpled packs, stray pencils, pins, numbs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-to-get heliotrope and raw umber... an empty Kreml hair tonic bottle, lost pieces to different jigsaw puzzles showing parts of the amber left eye of a Weimeraner...
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Because it was done principally on wood, nothing remains of Greek painting from antiquity * In 1889, the Spanish demand Goya's remains, dead and buried in Bordeaux in 1829; the body, without the head, is returned to Spain * The first, unfinished version of Jean Giono's The Song of the World was stolen from him in 1933 * On December 10, 1853, a fire ravaged the warehouses of Harper, Herman Melville's publisher, and destroyed the entire stock; demand was weak and no novel by Melville would be reprinted in his lifetime...
- Henri Lefebvre, The Missing Pieces

The earliest small book was the Diurnale Moguntium, printed by Peter Schoeffer in Mainz in 1468. From the beginning, the miniature book speaks of infinite time, of the time of labor, lost in its multiplicity, and of the time of the world, collapsed within a minimum of physical space.
- Susan Stewart, On Longing

The "living" [curiosity] cabinet, like the knowledge it so aptly represented, was, to paraphrase Foucault, a thing of sand. It was the context from which one could interpret and track the flow and movements of these resemblances and similitudes.
- David L. Martin, Curious Visions of Modernity

How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue... 
- George Perec, The Infra-ordinary

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
- Alice Munro

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
- John Muir

Get to know your garbage.
- Don DeLillo, Underworld

The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?
- Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Maintenance Art Manifesto But then I see a horse lying on the side of the road and think You are sleeping, you are sleeping, I will make you be sleeping. But if I didn't make the ham flowers, how can I make him get up? I made the ham flowers. Get up, dear animal. Here is your pasture flecked with pink, your oily river, your bleeding barn. Decide what to look at and how. If you lower your lashes, the blood looks like mud. If you stay, I will find you fresh hay.
- Matthea Harvey, Implications for Modern Life

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass... Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
- Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

He lay down behind the blade of grass
To enlarge the sky.
- Noel Bureau, Les mains tendeus

"Oh," I say and fumble for my wallet. The oil cans stacked against an old truck tire are wordless, hard, collusive. But the triangular plastic flags strung at one end of the island flutter and ripple in the wind, flapping to get my attention, my compassion, like things that seem to want to sing but can't, things that almost tear themselves in trying to fly, like rainbow-colored birds, hung by string and their own feet.
- Lorrie Moore, What is Seized
  - Sherman Alexie, You Don't Have To Say You Love Me

"You probably need to eat something," the baker said. "I hope you'll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this," he said.
- Raymond Carver, A Small Good Thing

When we saw the pattern, we took the kids out of school. Broke out the special water. Two churches linked by a sudden alley through the corn. As the Hopi myth fortells. A massive loss of technology. A spider leaves a string between two points. Think about it. From the duster it appears a thing of glory. Makes you reconsider the whole idea of property. Stems inside formations have blown nodes. Explain that, Mr TV. Part of the confusion involves words. We wake up with mud on our feet. The other part is just the way we are. Scared of the new when it's thousands of years old. If you have never seen a sleeping toddler crawl beyond the lip of porch light, zip it. If my meaning is clear, it's already too late. For God's sake, people. Open your hearts.
- Ben Lerner, Angle of Yaw