Stephen Nowlin - Prints

Stephen Nowlin reminds me of the Vermeer painting of the Astronomer. It depicts a seventeenth century astronomer contemplating ideas about the cosmos and existing knowledge. Stephen Nowlin makes work about the wonders of space with a lexicon of implied filters - terra firma and known knowledge. In this he is very much planted in his time and place in Altadena, California. With JPL, the Huntington Library and Art Center in his backyard, he uses resources close to him and his neighborhood, as he ponders the vastness of the universe.

With an interest in astronomy, cosmology, and ontological perspective, he concentrates on three differing ideas on understanding truth about the universe. This actual profound exploration yields images in these areas: “This Land”, “Marginalia,” and “Chronicles of Fallacy.” “This Land”, looks at terra firma, thinks about songs from Woody Guthrie to Irving Berlin that acculturate pride about America while also looking at land on earth and in our solar system. Using real images from NASA he uses our wonder and scientific facts to create new perspectives. The familiar songs about America and our love of physical country add a sense of ownership about our small particular piece of the earth. And so, because images of land on the earth and on

Mars look remarkably similar, we are challenged to make sense of it.

Images from the Mars Rover coupled with images from Tanzania (where we know the first evidence of modern man was found) invokes curiosity, amazement, and endless gazing opportunities. Not to mention, the work also invokes memories of earthworks and land art from the sixties and seventies. Like earthworks, our experience is remote and visual. Is Nowlin a twenty first century Smithson for the galaxies?

For his next series, “Marginalia”, he was able to gain admittance to the Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Huntington Library. That opportunity comes from being in the curator at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena,and his long reputation of gravitas and thoughtfulness . Looking at these rare images of art, astronomy, physics and religion he extracts the time old practice of writing in the margins. Then he scans in text and data from spacecrafts and telescopes in a way that challenges these out-of-date ideas with new facts. On one level, he is challenging a status quo from long ago, examining ideas that people thought were true. Combining texts from Charles Ives, Walt Whitman, and Richard Feynman with images of galaxies from outside the Milky Way for example, he imposes some of the best of humans on earth with the celestial data of the heavens. A through line in this work is the poem by Whitman, “When I heard the Learned astronomer. “I have to say that I immediately recognized the depth in this work because that poem is a go to one for me and has been for thirty years. I return again and again to the words of this poem when the world becomes too much. These words are particularly effective these days. Seeing the text in these gorgeous prints adds to that feeling of calm, and wonder, silence, and acceptance of a larger world outside on oneself. Here is the text:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, 

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, 

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, 

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, 

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, 

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, 

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, 

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

In the “Chronicles of Fallacy,” he examines truths of a certain time that have become fallacy through time and science. He reminds us of the fragility of exploration and “the culturally normalized forms of untrue beliefs” as he himself writes. What is initially very cerebral, often veers into the romantic, all the while connecting synapses to the long history of art. He contemplates the vastness of the universe, while marrying this to actual data. This in fact, is revolutionary. Nowlin is one the first and few artists who has substantial scientific proof of the matrix and uses art to explain its awesomeness. 

He places a big “X” over falsehood and beliefs that were once declared as truths. This examines the human inclination to believe fictional narratives and to see those consequences. Each of these pieces are Artists Proofs, but they all are Limited Edition Archival Pigment Prints. I sat in his studio where the Whitman, Feynman, Ives piece was hung. It provided moments of contemplation and beauty, wonder and wit.