Sharon Harper: From Above and Below by Jimena Canales

From Above and Below features ten years of Sharon Harper’s conceptual photographs and video stills exploring perception, technology and the night sky. Her experimental images of the moon, stars and sun draw on scientific and artistic uses of photography to illuminate the medium’s contradictory ability to both verify empirical evidence and to create poetic connections between our environment and ourselves. If one cannot gaze directly into the sun of the sublime, Harper offers the scarred and streaked transparences and prints of her attempts to do so, made manifest through the mediation of photographic and telescopic technology, and through the framework of time. Through Harper’s repeated long exposures, with time spans of hours to a month, star trails turn to star scratches, landscapes and cloud formations shift and the sublime is slowed to a trace made visible to the eye.