Page 18 - the NOISE March 2014

18 • MARCH 2014 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us
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that make up the whole; stepping back the swirls and eddies, caked and speckled look like a distant aerial photograph of earth.
“I think what you’ll notice in this exhibit is that you can feel it,” says Ms. Rechel. “I’ve never had that effect of looking at art where I actually feel changed by the place they came from. When I get overwhelmed at work, I come in here and it’s really settling because I can feel the spiritual connection with the earth in this artwork. It relaxes, motivates and inspires me and I can go back to work refreshed.”
Most of the work included in this exhibit was created in 2013 during extensive time spent in Flagstaff and Bisbee, Bryce Canyon, and Lisbon Valley, and created at Ms. Arnold’s outdoor studio at Broken Arrow Cave near Big Water, Utah. But two distinctive paintings that stand in stark, silvery black contrast to the earth-toned majority, were created out of meteorite dust in her studio in Dusseldorf, Germany. Ms. Ar- nold began adding meteorite dust to her rocky recipe after a chance meeting with meteor scientist Marvin Killgore at the Barringer Crater in Arizona 10 years ago. Ms. Arnold is attracted to these “star-dust witnesses” because they come from an early epoch of the universe older than Earth.
“I expose myself to the forces of nature,” says the artist. “It’s very special to touch these messengers from the beginning of our solar system. For me, it’s like ‘Heaven and Earth,’ all through a lucky coincidence meeting.”
Ms. Arnold has worked in Togo, India, Japan, Armenia, Ye- men, Iceland and Chile; and is recently back from an extend- ed trip in Senegal, but Flagstaff and the magnificence of the nearby Colorado Plateau retain a special place in her heart.
“My inspiration comes from the land, the light and colors,” she says. “I try to capture the essence, or you can say, the soul of a place. I look for land with magic appearance, so the beauti- ful Arizona and Utah area is one of my favorite places on Earth.”
A Members’ Preview event with a Director’s Welcome & Pre- sentation by Curator of Fine Arts, Alan Petersen, takes place on Friday, March 7 from 6-8PM, and a gallery talk with the art- ist is open to the public on Saturday, March 8 at 2PM. 3101 N. Fort Valley Road. MusNAZ.org
BEYOND THE MOON:
REIMAGINING THE MYSTERIES OF THE NIGHT SKY
Interestingly enough, this month we have another artist as connected with the cosmos as MNA artist Ulrike Arnold is to
Broken Arrow Cave by Ulrike Arnold is among the works from “EARTH” at the Museum of Northern Arizona.
the earth. Out toward Snowbowl, a left down a dusty gravel road darts through the pines and climbs upward until dead- ending at the funky, turquoise, corrugated tin compound of artist Frederica Hall.
Propped up on easels around her studio are a multitude of canvases, large and small, and in various stages of completion, from the blank red canvases she starts with, to the astrono- my-based but mystically rendered depictions of outer space. Her palette mimics the ultraviolet purples and reds that tele- scopic technology adheres to different light frequencies im- perceptible to the human eye — science’s own creative inter- pretation of the cosmos.
Ms. Hall has been fascinated by the mysteries of the night sky since she can remember, but it became the sole focus of her art 20 years ago when she came across telescopic photo- graphs of nebulas (clouds of cosmic gas and dust) and super- novas (exploded stars) online. In retrospect, it would seem prophetic that she studied under one of the NASA space art- ists in earlier years.
She began intensively studying maps of the sky and look- ing at photographs, eventually piecing together hundreds of images and thousands of light years into single snap shots of the heavens. Though grounded in the scientific — she tries to get the placement of stars as accurate as possible and her paintings are of specific, named nebulas in the sky — Ms. Hall is most intrigued by the imagery she sees in the formations.
“I see human forms, faces and birds,” says Ms. Hall. “The first time I saw them, I was amazed; now it’s impossible not to see them. Scientists can decipher nebulas as innumerable par- ticles of dust, hydrogen and helium gas, and plasma, collaps- ing and clumping together due to mysterious gravitational attraction into vast clouds light years across, but they can’t explain why they coalesce into the shapes they do. Why does that cloud hold together like that? Why does that bubble look like a face? They’re hundreds of thousands of them like this,” she says, pulling up an image whose swirling, smoky light does take on a human form. “They look like things, beings. Is that just my imagination or is there some kind of greater in- telligence there? I’m trying to bring out these images in my paintings. It will just be a subtle suggestion because I want to keep it in the same ephemeral realm, so that it stimulates someone else’s imagination ... so the viewer engages and sees more than I even put there.”
Her studies of the stars have led her into the ancient my-