Nihil fit ex nihilo – nothing comes from nothing - and it is within this thought driven to its broadest dimension that Cosmos (Heavens/ Earth) unfolds. Todd Eberle traces particle wakes through and in spite of time, connecting the phosphorous in our bones and the proteins in our cells to the great hurling masses of the cosmos. Variations on ‘we are all made of stars’ have been intoned from Lucretius to Joni Mitchell, and yet this sentiment barrels through the ages, absconding irrelevance through sheer poetry.

We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
back to the garden

- Joni Mitchell
(Woodstock)

Eberle pairs flowerscapes with images taken by the Hubble telescope, both contents then Rorschach-heisted through duplicating and mirroring techniques. Their construction is then augmented through their display, as both series are hung opposite each other along the gallery walls. 16 original photographs, completely unique in creation, color, contrast and variation. The resulting images transcend their polar origins and meet in a middle sphere – flowers and galaxies bend into each other, closing the gap between the differing magnitudes they represent: in-transience and eon-ages, fragility and untenable mass.

Eberle’s work extracts symmetry from chaos, specifying creative moments in differing time scales: both outside the realm of human control. And yet, Cosmos Heavens/Cosmos Earth, large in format, allow a generosity of information that counteracts their seemingly imperturbable origins. Printed at over 2 x 1.5 meters (or 90 x 60 inches) in dimension, the works become portals into worlds of indeterminate scale and gravity, where the spectator, enveloped by detail and vibrant color, is induced into projecting their own associative nexuses. The images are subsumed into a subjective sphere, pulled into vis-á-vis encounter with a mind space that is simultaneously reflecting itself and its provenance: “we are the way for the universe to know itself”. In this sense, the space between our inner mind and Eberle’s outer work is bridged, like flowers and cosmos melting into each other, in all their unpredictable and multiple forms.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Todd Eberle is an acclaimed New York City-based photographer whose work is united by a clean and analytical minimalist aesthetic. Eberle’s subjects run the gamut from political, art, and cultural figures to architectural landmarks and technology. He has worked as photographer-at-large at Vanity Fair since 1998 and has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, WPS1/MoMA/The Clocktower, and Tate Modern.

Eberle gained international recognition for his photographs of Donald Judd’s art and furniture that he took at the great sculptor’s Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and elsewhere around the world in the 1990s. Informed by this experience, Eberle’s photographs are characterized by an ever-presence sense of control, proportion, and symmetry.