THE GRAVITY OF THE SUN, 2025
Stanford University, Stanford, CA
Commissioned specifically for the Graduate School of Education, The Gravity of the Sun suspends histories of pedagogical practice within a diaphanous, cloudlike expanse of white and blue kites. The square kites in the columns feature colorful forms and patterns drawn from ideas of pedagogy, invention,translation, interpretation, and linguistics. The team of graphic artists in the studio honed in on marks and shapes that recur throughout shared histories across time—shapes that appear in everything from wheels of Dharma to the secret decoder rings in Cracker Jack boxes; from the cartography of Harappan seals to botanists’ illustrations of plant cells. Suspended within the resin, these myriad graphics on washi paper have the lighting effects of stained glass but seem weightless from below. We see these pillars of kites as collaged columns of erudition. Fragments of culture, fragments of history, fragments of human achievement are all recombined, repurposed, and reinvented as the viewer visually traverses this forest of knowledge in the sky. The title of the work is areflection on our shared experience of being on the planet: the yearly cycle around the center of our solar system, interpreted here as the myriad ways cultures have developed to explain our world and our experience of it to ourselves and each other. The artwork contains a total of 6,500 kites, tied to 132 frames using roughly 17 miles of Spectra thread. As a whole, this set of graphic kites represents a broad collection of historical styles. Photos by Henrik Kam
