One snowy afternoon in December, several women gathered in artist Mary Simon-Casati's southwest Minneapolis home for a little lunch and a lightweight chat about astrophysics and art. The firelit living room crackled with energy; conversation sparked and flared, bouncing from philosopher to art historian to physicist and back, traversing the cosmic terrain of dark matter, energy, quarks and their quasi-poetic names.
"The thing about particles," the artist said offhandedly, "is that none of us can see them, ever. We don't know what they look like. Science can figure out what sort of spin they have and what it interacts with. But otherwise, we're dealing with the unknown."
Her latest paintings and sculpture explore, in visual terms, phenomena that are largely intangible, ineffable and unseen. The result of three years of research and an intensive yearlong exchange of ideas with University of Minnesota astrophysicist Liliya Williams, her solo show "Smashing the Invisible" is on view at the university's Regis Center for Art through Feb. 10.
Simon-Casati's lifelong fascination with the unknown was brought into sharp focus when her mother passed away. Grappling with the enormity of absence and loss, she began to wonder: What happens to matter after we die? Where does energy go? "I liked the idea that we become stars, because we come from stars," she laughs. "That's not quite the case."
Her questions unfolded into further questions, leading her eventually to Williams' work, which maps the location of dark matter in space.
As their intellectual conversation evolved into friendship, Williams and Simon-Casati sought a common lexicon with which to describe their disparate visions of the world. In the process, they found a few fundamental concepts — symmetry, clarity, ambiguity, objectivity and subjectivity, the abstract and the concrete — that underlie and inform their understanding of reality itself.
"What physics strives for is clarity in the perception of the world," Williams says. "In art, it's the other way around — you want the viewer to read whatever makes sense to them into that particular piece of art. Your eyes perceive the painting itself, but what that means for you and what you get out of it goes beyond that painting."
'A beautiful question'
The historical relationship between scientific inquiry and visual art predates even Leonardo da Vinci, though his artistic renderings of scientific subjects are perhaps the best-known example of this overlap.