 |
| "Sparticle" |
|
|
|
Nina Bliese Gallery
presents
"Entangled Strings"
Contemporary Photographs by
Gary Smaby
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| "Aurigin" |
|
|
|
For more than forty years, Gary Smaby’s artistic eye has peered through a camera lens; capturing memorable images that run the gamut from classic portraiture to experimental new media. He has trained his lens on an eclectic range of subjects: from legendary rock stars and Nobel laureates to breathtaking Himalayan and Serengeti landscapes. His acclaimed body of work has been variously featured on gallery walls, album jackets, as well on the web and in publications like the New Yorker.
Over that same span, Smaby has also been an oft-quoted observer at the leading edge of Western science and technology, as well as an ardent practitioner of the Eastern contemplative science of meditation. His latest work is a fusion of these oppositional influences; inspired by a methodology for intellectual inquiry that is surprisingly favored by both ancient Buddhist monks and contemporary physicists when pondering metaphysical phenomena that can neither be seen nor experimentally confirmed.
|
 |
| "Ryoan Ji" |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| "Singularity" |
|
|
 |
| "Sphere 55" |
|
|
|
|
Smaby used this shared technique, called the thought experiment to artfully blend three divergent and uniquely personal mind streams: his insightful understanding of contemporary science, his direct experience with Raja Yoga and Zen meditation and his artistic gift for visual improvisation.
For his thought experiments, Smaby previsualized how ordinary every-day things might appear if the quantum uncertainty theorized by particle physicists at extremes of the infinitesimally tiny and unimaginably galactic were to prevail at the macrocosmic scale we call reality. In other words, how might our perception of ordinary things be altered if the ‘immutable’ laws of Newton and Einstein are indeed as impermanent and illusionary as professed by Buddhist scholars for millennia?
While the show’s title, "Entangled Strings" is a conjunction formed from two mind-numbing theories in high-energy physics - entanglement and superstrings; it is the unseen spiritual dimension that endues Smaby’s evocatively abstract photographs with a luminous and mystical essence.Catalog link to Gary Smaby's images in our current exhibition: Gary Smaby
|
|
|
 |
| "Spin Minus Two" |
|
|
|
|
