Artist Talk: September 14, 11am Gallery Talk with former Jet Propulsion Laboratory Artist in Residence David Em moderated by Dina Chang: September 14, 1pm __ As part of Getty’s PST Art: Art & Science Collide initiative, Craig Krull Gallery presents The Outer & Inner Space Continuum, featuring three concurrent solo exhibitions from Los Angeles-based artists situating themselves amid the vast cosmos, carefully considering the relationship between the individual and the universal. Recognized for his exploration of social patterns and systems, Greg Colson makes sculpture, paintings, and assemblage with equal attention to material and conceptual elements. Heliocentrism (Not to Scale) features absurdist models of our solar system that suggest conflicting notions of movement and gravity. In his sculptural reliefs, Colson depicts the sun and orbiting planets with found balls that were kicked and hit in their previous lives, while shelves supporting some of the objects negate any illusion of planetary motion. Other paintings have planets made with an array of mundane items—poker chips, coins, and clothing remnants—implying human exploration and occupation beyond Earth. Colson also approaches anxieties about A.I. and biases about the biomass of animal life in two new pie chart paintings, whose exaggerated icons and colors compromise the actual information. These contradictions—dysfunctions, even—are the engine of Colson’s work. As poet and art critic John Yau recently wrote for Hyperallergic, Colson combines “a penchant for exactness with a sensitivity to detritus and waste. By being meticulous in his interaction with abandoned things, Colson infuses the act of care and attention with pathos.” Distilling the poetry and humor in our social patterns, Colson suggests there are limits to—and hazards inherent in—our obsession with efficiency and order. Likewise, photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher examines the relationship between micro and macro in Stardust: Bone & Botticelli, the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery. The exhibition features images of Fisher’s own bone, detritus from the back of a Botticelli painting undergoing restoration at the Getty, and other lyrical contemplations on dust— this ubiquitous material that collects on the contours of our world, marking time, body, and place. Inspired by recent discoveries from the Webb Space Telescope, Fisher meditates on a defining truth: the calcium in our bones and iron in our blood came from the explosion of a dying star billions of years ago. Or, as Carl Sagan put it, “the cosmos is within us.” In the latest of her micrographic quests, Fisher magnifies and inverts her images, exploring the interchangeability of form and space, dark and light, negative and positive. Zoomed in thousands of times, a blood cell becomes a celestial body; crumbs of wax, dirt, and grime stretch into entire landscapes. Everything of the cosmos—from a speck of dust to a planet, a neuron to a galaxy—is connected. James Griffith’s work takes substance as its subject too. The artist makes his paint from tar collected at the La Brea Tar Pits, mixing the material with driers, varnishes and solvents, then washing it across wood panels and letting it pool and bubble organically. The tar itself carries many associations: it’s linked to preservation and decay, to evolution and extinction. It’s the fossil product of geologic time, and a substance that contains thousands of years of human and animal history. It’s also the basis of petrochemical substances linked to climate change that now threatens life on our planet. Small Paintings of Infinity contemplates this life and its origins. As Griffith has noted, “burning stars manufacture the complex chemistry of life from the simplest compounds.” His new works include panoramic starfields, the violently creative forces of the sun, and portraits of people and animals intimately intertwined with the cosmos—living beings that share a heliocentric existence. Pondering a central question—“do we live in an infinite universe?”—Griffith etches, washes, and scrapes his subjects and scenes into the tar veneers, evoking a history that begins with the chemical building blocks of life, a shared origin story. Taken together, these paintings highlight the beauty and fragility of life on Earth, and its rarity in the universe.