Glen Cheriton BFA

Glen’s show, Aggregate: of all our joys and sufferings, displays many different photographic processes that work out his interests in both space and time. A flickering 16 mm movie reel, star-like pin holes of light coming from the window and wrapping around the body, negative strips of warped sequences, and a very large image of stars in their orbit were all a part of the gallery space. The title of his show comes from a quote by Carl Sagan, about an image of earth from taken by the Voyager space probe when it reached Saturn, in which Earth is just a mere blue pixel.

“If you look at [the picture], you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”

Glen spoke about how he believes time to not be a linear and how photography does not just capture a moment in time – every photograph is of a duration of time. He showed how it can encompass a whole event. One idea that came up during his talk is how art and science can mix with one another. One of the reasons Glen enjoys photography is that it uses an instrument – the camera – which has been used for both artistic and scientific ends.

Art is often used to display scientific processes, or to simply illustrate an organism. Film and photography have been integrated into many scientific explorations to obtain footage for research, and to share with the public. Since we began exploring the moon – some sort of photographic process went along with us. Photography helps to connect us to the world we live in- but Glen wants to see it even farther, connecting us to our entire universe.