The Sea & The Sky

A 47-page catalogue accompanies this exhibition with an essay by Susan Stewart and a published conversation between the curators.

Michael Blodget, Vija Celmins, Thomas Chimes, Seoungho Cho, Linda Connor, Russell Crotty, Tacita Dean, Elger Esser, Spencer Finch, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Andreas Gursky, Richard Harrod, Willie McKeown, Michael Light, Garry Fabian Miller, Richard Misrach, Donald Moffett, Stephen Murphy, Eileen Neff, Robert Nesbit, Thomas Ruff, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Judith Taylor, Grace Weir, Bradley Wind

The Beaver College Art Gallery is pleased to present “The Sea & The Sky,” a transatlantic traveling exhibition focusing on the ocean, atmosphere and cosmos as subjects for contemporary works by 24 regional, American, European, and Asian artists. Executed in a variety of media–including painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, video, and installation–the 44 pieces included depict nothing but the surface of the sea, banks of clouds, and fields of stars as a way to explore the sublime, the existential, and the construction of meaning given the absence of any conventional “subject.”

A collaborative project co-presented by Beaver College Art Gallery and the Royal Hibernian Academy (Dublin, Ireland), the exhibition will open with a public reception on February 17, 2000, starting at 6:30 PM with a conversation between exhibition co-curators, Richard Torchia, Director of the Beaver College Art Gallery and Patrick Murphy, Exhibitions Director of the Royal Hibernian Academy (and former Director of the ICA, Philadelphia).  

“In works of art representing the sea or the sky, there is always an infinite reach or recession—behind the heavens is the unending vastness of space; behind the breakers, the extent of the main; under the surface, the depths; behind the clouds, the stars; behind the stars, more stars; and behind our consciousness of these views, a vast, inarticulate, and untranslatable consciousness. Every gesture indicating surface and depth in these works is an index to the profundity of profundity itself. As watchers of the sea and heavens—at least from Amerigo Vespucci onward—gathered their observations in notebooks and bound manuscripts, they speak to our need to find some legible and encompassing form for such vastness. Meville’s Ishmael described the laborious transmutation of the whale into “Bible leaves! Bible leaves!” Marcel Proust watched the sea reflected in the glass of a bookcase. To frame enormity within the covers of a book, to register the infinite through a series of patient, exacting, marks on sheets of paper, brings the scale of such phenomena back to hand and eye and thought—the vehicles of human intelligibility.”
— Excerpt from “What Thought is Like” by Susan Stewart from the Sea and the Sky catalogue.