D. Dominick Lombardi, Curator
The room seemed to tip, and its walls and ceiling and floor were transformed momentarily into mouths of many tunnels–tunnels leading in all directions through time.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
Missing socks? It happens in the best of dryers. I am wondering if this might be proof of the existence of the multiverse on its most fundamental level. Let’s think about this. Socks are some of the smallest and lightest objects in the wash set within a bundle of much heavier damp clothes. Picture the whole mess spinning, things heating up quickly and you have the perfect circumstance for jumping from one universe to another. Hence, the missing sock, which isn’t actually missing. It simply transferred to an alternative plane of existence.
All kidding aside, physicists have been speculating that there are numerous, parallel universes for well over a century. Beliefs that are gaining more and more recognition and acceptance well beyond the sciences, exemplified by recent films like “Everything Everywhere All At Once” directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, or contemporary science fiction novels such as “The Space Between Worlds” by Micaiah Johnson. Still others, like myself, look with great interest to how the conscious or subconscious recognition of alternative planes of existence can be seen in many aspects of contemporary visual art.
Considering visual art, one can even say that hints of the multiverse started with the earliest religious art that depicted heaven above the earth, or hell below. Even the great masterpiece The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516), which depicts the Garden of Eden and the Last Judgment straddling a most bizarrely sinful day, offers strange structures and inexplicable interactions that are otherworldly in appearance. A stretch for sure, as the narratives in these early works are based on scripture. However, how the artist chooses to interpret the information given may suggest speculation of different worlds. In fact, it is artists like Bosch who have helped writers, filmmakers and visual artists crystalize their vision of alternate worlds.
For this exhibition, I have selected most of the analog artists from the Northeast and video and digital artists from places like Spain, Peru, Mexico and Canada. Each artist will present their unique interpretation of the multiverse through striking imagery, some with familiar references, while others will reach beyond the known. This mixing of metaphors is fitting for such an exhibition as the concept of the multiverse, with the potential of as many as 11 dimensions predicted by theoretical physicists, is extremely difficult to grasp.
When Martin Weinstein (NY) paints plein air, or directly from life, combining two “single realities” that are days or years apart. To accomplish this, the artist presents three distinct overlapping painted layers on clear acrylic sheets that visually merge. This technique of ‘seeing through’ results in eye-catching depth and an oddly disorienting atmosphere. Physics comes into play as Weinstein sees this as an “investigation of time and memory as well as a diary of acts of perception.” Weinstein’s process shows the multiverse in a more personal form, suggesting the virtual instability of our physical world as our solar system hurtles 450,000 miles per hour through ever expanding space.
The videos of Pierre St Jacques (Canada) reveal “how we ultimately construct the person that we are.” In Two Birds on a Wire (2022-2024), the artist offers us a “glimpse of what it means to be human,” achieving this through multi-channel videos that offer more than one view of a moment. It’s sort of like deja vu, only with different individuals as they experience what appears to be the same physical space. Conversely, A Gathering of Shifts – Head (2011-2012) is more about the total loss of self. Time here is blurred, connections to reality are lost and anxiety spikes leaving the protagonist surrounded by dark matter and shooting stars and no particular universe.
Todd Colby (NY/MA) takes a more direct, albeit multilayered approach. The goal here is “to make visual work that doesn’t sit still.” Colby is a master of transitional space, a “disorienting and fragmented synchronicity of our world” as he calls it. These next few years will be trying times for our planet. Truth and reality are no longer universal concepts, and perhaps they never were. In Colby’s art, the multiverse is an eternally elusive mental state of uncertainty and a feeling of staggering change. “It certainly feels like we’re all living in a glitch of some sort in 2025, so maybe the multiverse is the new realism.”
Allison Lu Wang’s (CA) art is the most immediate. Fueled by the multi-layered culture of California, Wang begins with analog collage and some inpainting, later moving her process to the digital world where this cacophony of pieced together images can be manipulated in endless ways. “Pictorially, no subject matter is treated with more or less importance, however direct cinematic and pop-cultural references can take on greater significance.” This tendency results in a multiverse that is simultaneously familiar and farfetched. And it is that space between here and there that transports the viewer to a fantastical place.
Alicia Renadette’s (RI) art is a response to our collective overstimulation of multiple truths and lies. By assembling and elevating the mundane to an enlightening level as sculpture, Renadette reorients our thinking chiefly by bending the suggestion of a past, present and future. Do objects have memory? Are they still connected in some way to their previous owner? You can’t help but feel that when looking at Renadette’s art, that the addition of manipulation and repurposing objects from the past presents the multiverse in all its altered states.
Bisner (Portugal) creates art that “explore(s) the overlaps between the past and the present, creating a visual multiverse where different eras coexist and interact.” This is achieved through the use of vintage flea market photographs mixed with commercial pop icons. Additionally, the techniques used such as spray paint and traditional collage helps to amplify multi-level narrative. By making art that “transitions between the urban and the timeless,” Bisner opens doors and windows to altered spaces that sweep through space by ignoring the element of time.
Max-o-matic (Spain) looks to “Oulipo, Surrealism and psychedelia” for inspiration. His art features “two overlapping worlds (that) become a multiverse, open to endless interpretations”. Additionally, the camouflage patterns employed challenge our understanding of the hidden in plain sight, which is a staple of altered realities. There is also a sense here of the personal in Memory series (11) (2023), and the mythical in Autorretrato, Lucha (2023). In the end, Max-O-Matic’s art creates a dialog that resides both in our conscious and unconscious minds, giving viewers a momentary link to the multiverse.
Vincent Dion’s (CT) “work often deals with interconnected realities.” His Soft Gym series “stems from the family lore of (his) father’s early death from injuries in the Navy and (his) grandfather’s tragic death, a fireman who died after saving a boy from a well. Using rolled up and heavy fire hoses creates “proxies for (his) inexperienced relationship with these role models of mythic status,” while the “socks signify human stories untold.” I was drawn to Dion’s work for this exhibition from a far different perspective, seeing the humor and the irony in his art, and how the multiverse can displace objects.
Maggie Nowinski (MA) takes a more biological view, for lack of a better word, of the multiverse. Nowinski’s art may remind some of the works of Max Ernst where flora and fauna become one in his enigmatic and weirdly inhabited landscapes. As a result, we are not sure if we are looking at something microscopic or galactic when viewing these complex drawings. “The ambiguity of scale evoked in (Nowinski) drawings suggests there is a parallel – or perhaps internal – space in which these biological systems exist.” This hybridization shows the multiverse in much of its complexity.
Erick Baltodano (Peru) is inspired by “how images represent thoughts and ideas.” By paring this down to just a few elements, the artist brings us quickly and directly to the very edge of the multiverse where parallel worlds momentarily clash. That millisecond as the initial break from here to who knows where cuts through known space where something pivotal is clearly transformed. Through the purest and simplest of means, Baltodano makes it clear that what we think we know is just the very edge of being. What we may suspect is out there is what we hope to experience.
Eric Nord (NY/CA), aka Dirtcastle, seeks “synthesis, abstraction, and conversation” creating imagery that is transcendental and wondrous. The subjects that inhabit the JUNKYARD DAWG$ series are a most complex form of cyborg representations, a powerful presence of data driven humanoids that wander the multiverse like us humans dial a radio. These works also have their own unique brand of history, a compilation of strong references to the many ways that the environment controls adaptation. Nord “believes that if you look both carefully and haphazardly at his pieces, you might observe peculiar ambiguities involving unstable intersections of space, time, matter, energy, and information. These instabilities are opportunities for exploration, experimentation, and recalibration.”
T. Michael Martin’s (KY) art runs the gamut between the practical aspects of diagrammatic engineering to the impractical, albeit compelling juxtapositions of such diagrams. Martin sees these works as “Broken Narratives” indicating both disconnectedness and transience, which is very much a part of the notion of the multiverse. Additionally, Martin’s art lives both on the periphery and the center of our attention. His art has its own unique space where physics is both admired and minimized, creating a space where simple objects gain note and worth as systems devolve and are replaced by curious aesthetics.
Oscar Rodríguez Amado (Mexico) projects both a strong spiritual feel as well as mythical overtones in his AI Art. In both, the multiverse comes through, especially in POST COLLAGE NUM 13: Demons are real (2023), which shows the alter ego or alternate universe ‘being’ of a female form from an “alternate plane.” This connection gives the main subject a powerful presence, being a part of an alternate reality. “The idea of the eternal, of the place that exists beyond the mind” in Amado’s art reveals a mythicism that is ages old, a connection to the past where supernatural beings influenced behavior and thinking.
Susana Blasco (Spain) offers two mesmerizing collages created from flea market type found photos. By centering the geometric patterning over the subject’s face, the artist projects a multi planar awareness of the multiverse. Here, the subjects know and can sense an otherworldliness as it passes through space and ‘solid’ form, oscillating between here and there. Additionally, the geometry of the changing phases of space creates a multi-focused visual effect that adds much to the narrative, as the artist’s “process of creation, experimentation… in the generation of ideas through mixings, crossings, unexpected unions, and impossible combinations” comes to the fore.
Susan Meyer (NY) dazzles us with dimensional daring, bringing the concept of multi-planar living to wonderous levels. Her sculptures suggest “architectural concoctions – part topography, part commune, part disaster waiting to happen.” As a result, there is this constant sense of awe complicated by the potential calamity of open ends and scary drop-offs, spaces where vistas might be beautiful and breezy, even transcendent, followed by messy tragedy – housing where dimension demands attention and space has no middle ground and life is just a one act play.
Jeff Starr’s (NY) “interest is in the apparent increase in our daily visual/digital stimuli, and the resulting blur of TMI…” As a result, we are faced with Starr’s near hallucinogenic visions of “an unhinged narrative.” This menagerie of images, shapes, colors, patterns, faces and frills forms an endless loop of tenuously connected roads where the story bobs and weaves every inch of the way. Starr’s art, like the world of excesses and extremes we currently reside in, parallels the fluidity of the multiverse. The past, present and future are all here, an amalgamation of continuous levels of consciousness that provide only possibilities and more questions.
Lydia Viscardi (CT) “grew up with the stories and images of Catholicism, absorbing both the beautiful and horrific, and emerging with a paradoxical equanimity.” Her art challenges one’s idea of the afterlife held up against the veritable insignificance not just of humans against the backdrop of the universe, but of the earth itself. We are but a speck in the ‘BIG’ picture, and the possibility of other ways of existence are out there. This all harkens back to the concept of heaven and hell as mentioned in the beginning of this essay regarding The Garden of Earthly Delights, as some of the relative notions of weird science and belief systems overlap.
Juan Santiago Uribe (Columbia) pulls from “both art history and (his) own personal memory… revealing the tensions between order and disorder, permanence and change.” In Pink Green Nipple (2022), Uribe reveals how thought can bridge multi-dimensional space, even if only for a nano second. Capturing that closure of space in time is the essence of accepting the fact that there is a multiverse. An experience one might see and think they have imagined but is actually there. It is sort of like a glitch in the systems, a flash or impulse of errant energy that crosses from one plane to the next. It probably happens all the time, but it goes virtually unnoticed like a sudden chill or creepy feeling.
Adios From Everywhere offers videos that stretch the viewer’s understanding of what is sanity, sequencing unimaginable segues that smash through the outer limits of physical possibilities. Here we see the world tossed up and put through the blender of the multiverse, leaving us with mind bending menageries of references and imagery that is shockingly weird and frighteningly familiar. At some point in time we all have dark thoughts when pushed to the brink. The art of Adios From Everywhere is a profound blueprint for us to cautiously engage.
Leslie Giuliani (CT) “create(s) glimpses of otherworldly landscapes inhabited by imagined flora and fauna where houses can hang in the sky from a cloud, trees can walk, and flowery meteors can rain down on a distant ocean.” Memories of “fairy tales” growing up still influence the artist’s work till this day. Fantasy made with complex methods and refined techniques that portray alternate realities where the fantasized cohabitate.
Learn more about Multiverse on Mass Amherst site.
