Stitching time Talking entropy with Rachel Katz BY CHRIS THOMPSON

Portland artist Rachel Katz has for years been working on a body of work exploring the complexities of our relationship to the night sky. In her current series of embroideries, she methodically stitches by hand the lines of celestial movement, mapping the heavens one mark at a time, and doing so with materials that underscore the variety of ways in which our access to the skies above us are mediated. The Phoenix caught up with her to talk about her work and its implications:

Phoenix: Can you tell me about the thinking behind your work "Velpecula, the Fox?"

Katz: This piece is a combination of the star photos that have come in from NASA, which when translated into pictures have large areas of missing information on the edges of the photo, as well as Robert Smithson’s Negative Map Showing Region of the Monuments along the Passaic River, which was part of his 1967 series Monuments of Passaic. The work comes from a re-reading of the 1973 interview "Entropy Made Visible." There Smithson talks about his reclamation projects and the attempt that we make to reclaim or recover a frontier or wilderness that no longer exists, rather then learning how to re-incorporate entropic situations into our thinking. As he says: "I don’t think things go in cycles. I think things just change from one situation to the next, there’s really no return." My work comes from the belief that I do not engage with the world around me, that I live separate from nature. I am looking at the way we look at the world and how science has encoded that looking.

Q: In that interview Smithson talks about how we habitually try to transcend our lot; he says, "it’s very hard to predict anything; anyway all predictions seem to be wrong. I mean even planning. I mean planning and chance almost seem to be the same thing." To me it’s fascinating to think about what it would mean to have a practice that genuinely thought of planning and chance as equivalent activities.

A: I’m interested in how we look at the night sky and how science determines how we see nature. I have always been intrigued by Smithson’s dialectic of place, being in one place and thinking of another, particularly as he worked through these in his mirror displacements and gallery pieces of the 1960s, and the writings on entropy. How do we live in harmony with what is around us? How do we work with it rather then against it?

Q: It’s interesting to return here to the interview you mentioned, where Smithson insists that the engagement with temporality is crucial to being able to work with what surrounds us. He writes: "Pure science, like pure art tends to view abstraction as independent of nature, there’s no accounting for change or the temporality of the mundane world. Abstraction rules in a void, pretending to be free of time." It seems that your work in embroidery is a way of dealing directly with, or in his words "accounting for," the experience of time — of letting time unfold and make its mark on the work and on you. It’s also interesting that, at the same time, you’re stitching with electrical wire, which is the material that allows us to live our lives and accumulate information at such high speeds.

A: Here the notion of mediation becomes important. When Galileo turned his telescope to the night sky he forever altered our sense of who we are and how we see. He mediated the experience of the night sky through his telescope. Today our mediation is powered by electricity. For each light that goes on one star disappears from our view. At the moment I am particularly interested in Galileo’s moon observations. They were his first published observations with this new device called the telescope. He not only saw the dark side of the moon, but also saw that the moon itself was surfaced like the earth’s surface — complete with mountains, riverbeds, and craters. I wonder if what he saw is really that different from what I see when I look out my window. Only now, I don’t have to look out the window, I can go online, or watch TV and see everything outdoors without having to experience it anymore; electricity mediates that experience today.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com. Robert Smithson quotations are from Robert Smithson: the Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, University of California Press, 1996. This year is the 35th anniversary of Smithson’s infamous earthwork, Partially Buried Wood Shed at Kent State University in Ohio.