A Beach (For Carl Sagan)

Photo Credit: Peter McCullough

I made a trip to Chicago to see my brother.  Somehow he has a schedule busier than mine and so we had to plan this hang session about a month in advance.  After the date had been decided I figured one of our stops could be to the Museum of Contemporary Art because I was very young when i had my last visit.  My brother has a very small background in art, so I did not know what his reaction might be when i sprung it on him.  Luckily my brother has a imperturbable tranquility to him so he did not mind.  We walked around to browsing for a while in the beautiful specimen of architecture that is known as The Museum of Contemporary Art.  Although there was one section that held most of our intrigue.  

A Beach (For Carl Sagan) by: Andrew S. Young (Far corner  view)

It was a small nook at the top of the stairs that consumed us by its atmosphere.  It contained seven tons of sand, radios, an LED light box, and single-channel video (sound).  The installation was a model to scale of the galaxy.  Each grain of sand was representative of a star.  The LED light box contains 1,500 grains of sand and  represents the milky way galaxy.   So in comparison it is trying to show the mass outside of us that we can not comprehend.  Although this helped us with that.   According to Andrew S. Young "This exhibition is a meditation on our galaxy"  

A Beach (For Carl Sagan) by: Andrew S. Young (Middle view)

Whilst inside of this fabrication the mounds of sand look as if they were extracted from a desolate planet.  Also while you are inside of the space low frequency radios project static from the ceiling creating a wave like feel, thus creating the feel of an inter terrestrial beach.  Included in this exhibition was a table of objects that look like they may be of this space that we encountered.  Upon closer inspection we found them to be varying from things that were objects of our natural world to objects that were fabricated to look like things we may recognize from our world.  This was a clever play on looking at the constructs that we create.  And how we make associations to this, according to the structures that have been placed before us.  Especially when the object is not made up of any of the materials that we assume it to be.