When, at the end of the 1900s, Edward C. Pickering and his team of female scientists first trained their eyes on the stars, they peered into what felt like a limitless horizon. Today, following centuries of developing ever keener instruments to discern the cosmos, some of these tools now risk eclipsing our view of it. Increasingly, the earth is being blinded by its own electric glare and the glint of satellites revolving above.
The meticulous observations made by Pickering’s scientists are also in danger of disappearing. As Harvard’s archive of astronomical photographic glass plates becomes digitized, many of the notations they made by hand are being wiped clean so as to better observe the information beneath. Yet others bear the injuries of time, becoming cracked or molded. As stars burst and others are continually born, these plates display a shifting sky. Once damaged, they are consigned to obscurity within sleeves marked by a single purple dot. Those bearing the exculpatory mark are not scanned and rarely, if ever, again consulted.
Amélie Bouvier evokes these vanishing records. In a new series of drawings, she traces the lingering shapes of harm and loss in pigmented ink over veils of gesso and gouache on raw canvas. Using a quill and modified rulers, she fills drawn enclosures with delicate skeins: at times drawing lines that are even and steady, at others letting ink seep across the surface in gentle plumes.
Suspended on steel supports, the canvases take on a transparent quality, allowing new shadows to emerge on their back sides, while along the edges, panels of gesso have been used to blot excess ink from her pens. The works are a fitting close to Bouvier’s exploration of the Harvard collection, where the erasures of fragile glass plates and their tender notations elide with our own eroding night sky.
To these drawings, Bouvier endows the title Serapis, after the pagan god to whom the Serapeum was dedicated in ancient Greece. Known as the daughter of the Library of Alexandria, the magnificent temple was plundered and destroyed by Christians around 391. Contrary to common belief, the Alexandrian libraries were not consumed by sudden and violent conflagration. Their vast, rich holdings were diminished gradually over generations. The lost deity Serapis was a harbinger of what becomes of knowledge when it is no longer deemed worthy of preservation or protection. Some lessons when lost are lost forever.