EDGAR DEGAS

Combining fragility with experimentation, Degas tried to match the mediums of depiction with the subjects themselves. From the view of the orchestra pit, our sightline obscured by the curving, almost sensual necks of the double basses, we see dancers in rehearsal. They lean and whisper, observing the prima ballerina as she stand en pointe, and we become voyeurs to unfinished artistry, and the process of alchemy through which movements of bodies becomes transformative art. To capture this, Degas used a most unusual technique. First, he created a monotype print - painting directly onto a smooth plate of glass and then transferring the image to paper through a press, creating an unrepeatable printed image. Atop the monotype, he used a fine pastel to add color, detail, and texture, the powdery medium resting atop the printed image to create a sense of ethereality that matches the dancers. The technique is wildly experimental, matching the traditional material of pastel with the rarely used, more modern monotype print to create a work that is, at every level of its creation, about the strange, magical alchemy that can happen on stage, or on paper, to produce art.

HAROLD EDGERTON

Solid lead is heated until molten, poured through a copper sieve and allowed to fall down the length of a tower. The surface tension experienced in its decline forces the fragments into perfect spheres which are caught and called by a pool of water, and the lead shots go on to be used as projectiles for shotguns, ballasts, and shields for radiation. The process is beautiful in its simplicity, rigorously scientific in development and yet wildly raw, almost naive in its process yet to watch it with the human eye would be to see little but a wall of falling heat. It took Harold Edgerton, the man who stopped time as he became known, to demystify the process and turn it into aesthetic beauty. Edgerton developed stroboscope, and with it the entire field of high-speed photography. Where the camera had long been used as a way to capture the world around us, Edgerton used it as a scientific instrument to reveal the unseeable. Edgerton, using strobe lights and high sensitive film, turns a process that harnesses nature for violent ends into something ethereal, sublime, and deeply human.

FEDERICO CASTELLÓN

A self-taught artist and young prodigy, Castellón moved from his native Spain to Brooklyn, New York with his family at the age of seven. He was, even at this age, a gifted draughtsman and sketched relentlessly, and he spent his childhood taking advantage of the new city he lived in by visiting museums and exhibitions constantly. By the time he was a teenager, Castellón’s inspirations ranged from the Old Masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the burgeoning, contemporary Surrealist scene he had witnessed at small galleries. Before he had even graduated high school, he had caught the attention of Diego Rivera, who by this point was internationally acclaimed with public murals across the country. It was with Rivera’s help that Castellón travelled across Europe in his early twenties, taking in the emerging avant-garde and, on his return to New York, laid his claim as the very first American Surrealist. His etchings and sketches circulated the country and contributed to the rise of one of the most consequential movements of the century.