This article has been edited since it first appeared online.
Artist George Ferrandi — creator of “once & future stars,” on view at 1708 Gallery through Oct. 6 — in front of the wall map depicting “The Great Year,” the 26,000-year cycle of the procession of 11 heavenly bodies that inhabit the position of the North Star
An illuminating exhibition at 1708 Gallery is out of this world. Continuing through Oct. 6, artist George Ferrandi’s “once & hopeful stars” features sculptures, some of which are so massive, the temporary removal of the gallery’s front window was required to bring them inside.
Two points of note: These works are in Richmond for this brief time, and they have never been seen by the general public before. And “once & hopeful stars” is presented in conjunction with “Yours & Mine,” the exhibition of works by Ferrandi’s first sculpture professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, the late Joe Seipel. That impressive show is up at VCU’s Anderson Gallery until Sept. 28.
Ferrandi’s figurative representations of stars — those in the sky, not on a screen — represent a grand and glorious vision similar to gazing up at the shimmering heavens on the clearest night, free of intruding light.
The works incorporate fragile pieces made from wood, wire, string, dyed paper and electrical components, depicting figurative forms and the ancient names of enduring and massive celestial bodies. They were also meant to be paraded in a ritualistic manner, but a 2019 event cancellation prevented that from happening.
The “once & hopeful stars” are here because 1708 Executive Director Emily Smith emailed Seipel, a co-founder of the Broad Street gallery, asking what past student of his he would recommend for a show to complement the one at the Anderson. He responded: “George Ferrandi.”
Ferrandi’s lovely and humorous work is joyous and bright and, in our cataclysm-haunted age, posits an actual future for humanity. “Once & hopeful stars” looks way up, through not only clouds and smog but eons of time and light years of distance.
Figures from the installation “Alderamin,” which indicates the right shoulder in the constellation of an Ethiopian king immortalized in Greek myth, Cepheus. Also known as Alpha Cephei, Alderamin will next be the North Star around the year 7500.
There is a sense of ebullience to the work, as though the illuminated figures could float away to join their celestial namesakes. Part of this celebratory aspect comes from a later-in-life appreciation from Ferrandi for the night sky without the blanking out by city illumination and a longtime interest in the nature of community ritual, from circuses to neighborhood processions on the feast days of saints, from bar mitzvahs to celestial appreciations.
Ferrandi grew up in a mostly treeless Baltimore neighborhood. She moved to Brooklyn, New York, but arrived the day before 9/11. She found herself repairing and providing touch-up work to often quite old plaster and papier mache statuary representing holy figures in local churches. “The choir would be singing, and I’d be giving Jesus a mani-pedi,” she recalls, “and I’m thinking, ‘I can do this.’”
This evolved into the creation of a community parade in Philadelphia for a fictional character named Huberta, which involved karate clubs and Korean drum groups, among others. When asked at a recent talk how she brought together such a variety of people for this and other projects she’s directed, she responded, “snacks.”
About 10 years ago, she bought a cabin in the Catskills and for the first time witnessed the astounding view of an uncluttered night sky with the arm of the Milky Way galaxy in brilliant display.
For better comprehension of what she experienced, she picked up an old book titled “The Stars: A New Way to See Them,” by author H.A. Rey, which uses pictograms to map the constellations. (Rey and his wife, Margret, escaped Nazi-occupied Europe and created the series of children’s books about an adventurous monkey, Curious George.)
In the simple yet profound book, Ferrandi came across an illustration of what astronomers call axial precession. The term is described in the exhibition’s supplemental materials as “a slight wobble in the planet’s rotation that causes the alignment of stars over our polar axis to change slowly over time.” The nearly 26,000-year cycle is termed “The Great Year,” and during that period, 11 “celestial bodies will serve as the Earth’s North Star.” To put it another way, when the Egyptian pyramids arose, they were pointed toward a different North Star.
This gradual transience made an impression on Ferrandi. To us, Polaris is the North Star. Shakespeare wrote of its brilliance, and slaves seeking freedom from slavery in the South peered into the skies for its guidance. She wondered, who would commemorate this change of the North Star when the time came? The United Nations? NASA? She reckoned that this commemoration would fall to people who look up, and what better time to start preparing than now?
“Boots,” fabricated from 2018-2019 in Unityville, Pennsylvania, and Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, and “made of wood, wire, string, glue, wax paper, dye, electrical components, screws, some occasional zip ties”
She named her project Jump!Star. This honors Annie Jump Cannon, a Harvard astronomer at a time when the path for women in the profession was not an easy one, especially since she was also deaf. Cannon created the system of star classification that is still used today.
“In recent years, it’s understandably become easier for us to imagine the apocalypse than it is to look into the future with hopefulness,” Ferrandi says. “And yet, if we don’t start working immediately to invent the future we hope for, the one that we will get is horrifically unimaginable. Jump!Star asks us to look forward with love to the resilient civilizations of the future, and to take action to ensure them a livable world.”
Jump!Star, she explains, is a transdisciplinary initiative that brings together musicians, scientists, artists and cultural institutions, and interested or at least curious parties, to work together and create what may become traditions of the future to mark when the Gamma Cephei star moves into North Star position.
Across the country she has inspired “Constellates” comprised of committees for dance, food, music and climatologists (to project what food people might eat a thousand years in the future, given climate change).
The Constellates built sculptural representations of those stars involved with the axial precession, named and described by different cultures, and then made caricatures of them. These objects took their cue from the usually hand-carried parade floats from the Aomori Prefecture of northern Japan.
During the summer of 2019, 150 Constellate participants from across the country gathered in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, to dance with the North Star sculptures accompanied by original music. A video shows an excerpt from a rehearsal under a tent on the evening of June 15, 2019, the night before the scheduled premiere.
But the event never happened.
A wayward tornado swept through, wrecking other tents, but not that of the Constellates. Theirs survived, because, as Ferrandi explains in a word, “sculptors.” They firmly anchored the covering. The sculptures went into storage, their disposition uncertain, except you can currently go see some of them at 1708.
During a recent talk at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Ferrandi read a quote she cut and pasted so long ago that she doesn’t remember the source. “And it’s too good for me to have written it,” she says with deadpan delivery. The found paragraph is an excellent summary of the cosmic meditation on exhibit.
“Care and chance combine to age the work and give it a volume of experience that can be sensed by the viewer. They also extend and enrich the narrative of the object making it a souvenir of astonishing happenings and diverse emotions. The work exists not only of itself but as an occasion to tell a story and by extension to tell a story about the story it told.”
George Ferrandi's “once & hopeful stars” is on display at 1708 Gallery through Oct. 6.
