Gamwell sees echoes of Mitchell’s dark stars, for example, in Edgar Allan Poe’s narrative, “A Descent Into the Maelstrom,” especially the expressive 1919 illustration by Harry Clarke. “This appeared to have actually been an early example to a great void for many individuals when the idea was very first proposed,” stated Gamwell. “It’s a mathematical construct at that point and it’s extremely challenging to picture a mathematical construct. Poe really pictured a dark star [elsewhere in his writings]”

The highlighted art covers almost every medium: charcoal sketches, pen-and-ink illustrations, oil or acrylic paintings, murals, sculptures, standard and digital photography, and immersive room-sized multimedia setups, such as a 2021-2022 piece called Gravitational Arena by Chinese artist Xu Bing. “Xu Bing does the majority of his work about language,” stated Gamwell. For Gravitational Arena“He takes a quote about language from Wittgenstein and equates it into his own script, the English alphabet composed to look like Chinese characters. He uses gravity to it and makes a singularity. [The installation] is a number of stories high and he covered the gallery flooring with a mirror. You stroll upstairs and you see it’s like a wormhole, which he turns into an example for translation.”

“Anything in the area of a great void is strongly torn apart owing to its severe gravity– the greatest in deep space,” Gamwell discusses the long-lasting appeal of great voids as creative motivation. “We see this violence in the works of artists like Cai Guo- Qiang and Takashi Murakami, who have actually utilized great voids to signify the cruelty let loose by the atomic bomb. The unavoidable pull of a great void is likewise a prepared metaphor for anxiety in the work of artists such as Moonassi. Therefore, on the one hand, the great void supplies artists with a sign to reveal the destructions and stress and anxieties of the modern-day world. On the other hand, nevertheless, a great void’s severe gravity is the source of stupendous energy, and artists such as Yambe Tam welcome audiences to accept darkness as a course to improvement, wonder, and marvel.”