Overview

Thirty-Six Views of the Moon is a meditative collection of nighttime exposures made with book pages from texts referencing the night sky spanning the last ten centuries. Drink wine and look at the moon and think of all the civilizations the moon has seen passing by… — Omar Khayyam, 11th-century mathematician and poet Taking his cue from Omar Khayyam’s poem, Ebtekar produces a vignette of windows to the moon, inviting us to shift the direction of our gaze. In his process, the artist works with a photographic glass plate negative of the moon from the Lick Observatory archives in Northern California, treating each book page with Potassium ferricyanide and Ammonium ferric citrate (cyanotype) to make the surface of the page light-sensitive. Then, Ebtekar exposes the pages overnight in the UV-light emitted by the moon. This project challenges viewers to imagine the the moon looking at us, seeing ourselves as the objects of the moon’s billion-year gaze. There are four unique editions to the work, each produced under the moonlight of a season (i.e. winter, spring, etc.), and each with its own unique bibliography. The artist’s proof is the only edition made with moonlight from all four seasons over the span of one year.

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For over two decades, Ala Ebtekar (b. 1978, Berkeley, CA) has situated his practice as a relentless leveling and collapsing of time and space. His work frequently orchestrates various orbits and cadences of time, bringing forth sculptural and photographic possibilities of the universe and time observing humanity. The artist’s extensive research and thoughtful methods borrow and physically rework thousand-year-old traditions of image/object-making up to the latest technological advances.

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