Spooky Action at a Distance: Water Treatment
Racism | Bless You Diptych
2019
Diptych, 20” x 12” solar-powered lightbox, backlit film
Gratitude | Hate Diptych
2019
Diptych, 20" x 12" solar-powered lightbox, backlit film
Einstein once described quantum mechanics as “spooky action at a distance,” an invisible world of atoms that is composed of even smaller particles that can be moved and affected without being touched. The imperceptible energy exchanges and mysterious movements between these subatomic particles can also be affected in more than one place at one time and can occur thousands of miles apart.
This is what interests me as an artist: the invisible, imperceptible energy exchanges that engage our senses and challenge our perceptions. As Karan Barad states, “We are entangled or ‘deeply involved’ in the intra-action and making of the world;” during my Works on Water/Underwater New York Residency on Governors Island, I found this to be true.
During my residency in 2018, I experimented with these unseen energies by freezing water from the East River in containers that had positive or negative words, as well as computer codes, etched onto them. I called this artwork, The Language of Water. Similar to Masaru Emoto’s experiments in the1980s, documented in his book, The Hidden Messages of Water, I froze the river water in the same containers and then photographed the crystalline surfaces with astounding results. The “positive” words like gratitude created more uniform, harmonious surfaces, while the “negative” words, like hate had unsymmetrical, rough blemished looking surfaces.
For the 2019 Works on Water/Underwater New York residency, I continued to work with photographs of The Language of Water, that documented the phenomena of the energy of transference and thought and written intentions. By installing and building solar-powered lightboxes and then transferring the digital photographs of the crystallized surfaces of water into diptychs in backlit film, I could begin to frame the unseen invisible transference or exchange of energy, much like the transformation of sunlight into electricity.
Body of Water
About the Artist
Valerie Sullivan Fuchs considers the transference of energy between nature, technology, and us with solar power, hydroelectricity, ritual, and video installations. Collections: 21c Museum, Revive Corporation, & Laura Lee Brown & Steve Wilson. Exhibitions: Spring/Break Art Show, New York, NY; 21c Museum, Bentonville, AR, & Cincinnati OH; artwithoutwalls.org at the Kentucky Center for Art; American Embassy, Stockholm, Sweden; Contemporary Arts Museum, Santa Barbara, California; Non Grata Film & Video Festival, Pärnu, Estonia; Galerie Eugene Lendl, Graz, Austria; BELEF Art Festival, Belgrade, Serbia; Louisville International Airport; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Publications include Beauty Unlimited; Bibliography: Art Papers, Dialogue, and American Theatre. She’s received awards from Great Meadows Foundation; Hadley Creatives Fellow; Al Smith Fellow; KY Foundation for Women. She is a Program Mentor and holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.