My studio, called Chapel Studio, is where I probe astronomy, cosmology, and ontological perspectives emerging from the mixing of contemporary art and science, and their histories. Chapel Studio borrows its name from structures of meditation and reverence but has nothing to do with churches or religion, or fictions of the non-natural or so-called supernatural. It is a place to ponder and make, as science shapes our knowledge and embrace of the natural universe.

My work of the last few years has developed along three ongoing series: This Land, Marginalia, and Chronicles of Fallacy.

—————————

This Land series centers on an erosion of older Earth-centric perspectives that are prompted by new discoveries via land/space-based telescopes and exploratory spacecraft. The series references the Woody Guthrie song This Land is Your Land, written in 1940 as a critical response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America. Guthrie’s song romanced about the American landscape while also protesting its privatization and the treatment of Dust Bowl and Depression era refugees. In my This Land series I puzzle over the flawed concept of divine blessing and the provinciality of an Earth-bound conception of ‘land,’ as well as a reconsideration of what ‘our land’ could mean in a solar system full of new worlds. The series is a meditation on how science re-scales our perspectives by disrupting fixed assumptions concerning our place in the universe, what is ours to possess, and how we fit in.

This Land, (Planets 3 & 4), 2016-2023

Limited edition archival pigment print, 20 x 34in.

Top image: EARTH, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument Original source: National Park Service

Bottom image: MARS, Rocknest, Point Lake Area

Original data and processing: Curiosity Rover, NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

This Land, (Rosetta/Bierstadt), 2022

Limited edition archival pigment print; 20 x 30in.

Left image: Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, 2016

Original data and processing: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

Right image: Mirror Lake, Yosemite Valley, Albert Bierstadt,1864; Oil on canvas; Santa Barbara Museum of Art

—————————

The series Marginalia results from scanning pages of rare 16th to 19th century books whose content resonates with contemporary social issues, and then adding artist-created content, opinion, and commentary in the manner of marginalia (thoughts added in the margins of books). In addition, imagery from space telescope archives are digitally manipulated to be interwoven with texts drawn from history and from my own writings. The territory of exploration includes the histories of art and of sky science, and human knowledge informed around astronomy.

Marginalia (Our Only Heaven), 2023

Limited edition archival pigment print, 60 x 70in.

Text: excerpt from essay; Stephen Nowlin, Realspace, 2017.
Data: Webb Telescope, Globular Cluster M92 (NIRCam Image)
Original processing: NASA, ESA, CSA, Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

NATURE is space from here to over there, the airy in-between through which we pass to arrive at something. It’s wandering from the bedroom to find coffee and the morning paper, it’s the train station commute to the other end of the line, it’s pushing open the door. It’s anywhere and everywhere we go, fly, swim, dance, crawl and fall — and what we evade, sit on, step over. We avoid walls and the edges of cliffs. We’re skilled experts, dancers in a maze performing the choreography of getting around. We learn to know truth and our trust rises to a belief — no matter what else we may say we believe in, our actions pledge allegiance to our true belief, which is Nature. We worship our corner of it in unceremonious practice every time we start the car, board a jet, ride an elevator, or escape falling down the stairs. By gravity we’re stuck to the surface of an orbiting spherical satellite of a hydrogen-fusion star floating in a space vacuum, just as sure as we pour milk on our cereal. Nature is space, our cradle. Our mystery, our evolution, our only heaven

Marginalia (Of Scepticism and Certainty, Essay II) #2, 2022

Limited edition archival pigment print, 22 x 27in.

Page: scan of chapter heading page from Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion, 1676, by Joseph Glanvill. (The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

Marginalia (Ives/Feynman/Whitman), 2022-2023;

Limited edition archival pigment print, 44 x 35.5in.

Superimposed Elements:

Charles Ives: The Unanswered Question, 1908/1935

American composer Charles Ives wrote the score for The Unanswered Question, a six–minute orchestral piece celebrating the perennial human quest for knowledge, in 1908. It was updated and finally performed, three decades later.

Walt Whitman: When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer, 1867

When I heard the learn’d astronomer / When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me / When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them / When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture–room / How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick / Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself / In the mystical moist night–air, and from time to time / Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Richard Feynman: “Astronomy,” The Feynman Lectures, 1964

I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one–million–year–old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part . . .What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it, for far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

Marginalia (Of Scepticism and Certainty, Essay II) #1, 2022

Limited edition archival pigment print, 66 x 42in.

Page: scan of chapter heading page from Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion, 1676, by Joseph Glanvill. (The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

Marginalia (Uncertainty), 2023

Limited edition archival pigment print, 60 x 70in.

Text: excerpt from essay: Stephen Nowlin, Uncertainty, 2016.
Data: Webb Telescope, Stars and Galaxies Outside the Milky Way
Original processing: NASA, ESA, CSA, Kristen McQuinn, Zolt G. Levay

“To the best of our knowledge” is never a phrase frozen in time. It’s a bit like asking for ten percent of eternity, but that which cannot be counted also cannot be halved or quartered. A percent of infinity is the same as all of infinity. We can’t even say “all,” really, when speaking of something limitless. Likewise, what is knowable keeps expanding, trailed by our best of it, and it summons the realization that there’s something else …still… and then even more — even if all we know is all we think there is to know. Fractal–like, what we know drills down to reveal more places to drill down. It’s exhausting. Knowledge is the minuend; to our best of it, the subtrahend. Uncertainty is the difference.

—————————

The series Chronicles of Fallacy consists of painterly or pictorial disturbances imposed on scanned pages from historical astronomy and theology books – X’d out falsehoods that were expounded upon in detail and declared as the truths of their time. Fascinating pages exposing a human inclination to submit to fictional narratives, they represent wavering steps along history’s quest for knowledge. Some have been debunked and put to rest while others, emptied only of their past incarnations, are living still in culturally normalized forms of untrue beliefs. The series is meant to honor the better intentions of past knowledge attempts despite their being riddled with error, as well as to challenge current ones – and to examine the broad presence of fallacy intertwined with history’s ongoing search for truth.

Fallacy #7; 2023
Limited edition archival pigment print, 18.5 x 15in.
Source: Isaac Watts (1674-1748), The World to Come, or, Discourses on the joys or sorrows of departed souls at death, and the glory or terror of the resurrection / to which is prefixed, an Essay towards the proof of a separate state of souls after death … (The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

Fallacy #6; 2023

Limited edition archival pigment print, 19 x 22in.

Page: John Wilkins (1614-1672), The Discovery of a World in the Moone…, 1638; (The British Library Board)

Fallacy #1; 2022

Limited edition archival pigment print, 18.5 x 15in.
Page: John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation; 1722
(The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

Fallacy #8; 2023

Limited edition archival pigment print, 18.5 x 15in.

Source: Thomas Burnet (1635-1715), Conclusion from: The Sacred Theory of the Earth, 1684. (The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

……………………………………………

Stephen Nowlin’s website is https://stephennowlin.com . His works have been on display Summer 2024 through October 20 along with video artist Rebeca Méndez, in Of Sea and Sky, an exhibition inside the dome of the iconic 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory, overlooking Southern California.

All images copyright and courtesy of Stephen Nowlin.

Art, Creativity, Imagination, Science, Space