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, which we interlace with our own photographic images, in speculative narratives concerning 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).

We gather documentation from the Harvard Astronomical Photographic Glass Plate Collection with particular attention to the seasonal markers: the solstices and equinoxes which shift and change dates throughout time. Our process utilizes 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. We reframe and sometimes mark upon the found images. 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. The seasonal images are intimately scaled works on paper

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 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. Night Studio (Obscure Traces), our large-scale montages, are named in honor of those women, many of whom worked in obscurity, and are only recently being acknowledged for their contributions to their field. The history of these women and their role in early astronomy is remarkable. The vast darkness is where we aim ourselves in this moment which feels like an aporia for climate change, the environment, and all species.