NIGHT STUDIO (TEMPORAL DISLOCATIONS)

Ann Burke Daly + Marion Belanger
In Collaboration, 2024—ongoing

We are collaborating artists at work on Night Studio (Temporal Dislocations). Our process involves researching astronomical files of the night sky, and using these and found text that we interlace with our own photographic images and text, in speculative narratives about time, weather, sleep disturbances and dreams, historic women astronomers, subjectivity, and collaboration itself. We are Ann Burke Daly (Intermedia Artist) + Marion Belanger (Lens Based Artist), both MFAs from Yale (Daly, painting; Belanger, photography).

Part of the work is a co-journal called “Weather Reports” where we write daily, with a notational approach pertaining to the interests and ideas of Night Studio. We are also gathering documentation from the Harvard Astronomical Photographic Glass Plate Collection. On a given day we find astronomical plates made on that day in history. This practice began in earnest on January 1 with the intent to continue for the duration of the year 2025. A final piece will include 365 photographic prints, each one representing a day of the year. The prints will include those made from historic documents (going as far back as the 1880’s); images that we make; double exposures of historic plates, and a combination of our exposures with those from the archive. Some we will intervene with marks, words, painting, and reframing.

This year-long piece will be made of intimately scaled works on paper. We are also working to create large-scale images of the night sky some of which will be altered with over-painting and double exposures from found negatives. Together, we each bring different strengths to the mix, and embrace the greater sense of experimentation, inquisitiveness, and conceptual rigor held in play with the acceptance of accidents and role of chance in the working process and what we create collaboratively. We will also have some distinct series that will focus on specific aspects of the night sky such as the Pleiades Star Cluster and the Orion Nebula.

 We are influenced by the life path of Vera Rubin, an astronomer seen as foremost in discovering evidence that verified the existence of dark matter, and in how she pursued her interests despite societal forces. We are equally motivated by the many Women Astronomical Computers who worked in the late 19th and early 20th century on the physics calculations, and visual records (the glass plates) of astronomical events documented through the Harvard and other telescopes. The proliferation of such numbers of women working in a crossover of stem and visual culture piques our interest. The history of these women and their role in early astronomy is remarkable. We find the smallness of the known universe astonishing. The vast darkness is where we aim ourselves in this moment which feels like an aporia for climate change, the environment, and all species.