Professor puts universe to SCALE

By Jeremy Bookmyer, Asst. Copy Chief

May 22, 2007 | 11:12 a.m.

On May 5, 2007, the SCALE exhibit opened at the Kennedy Art Museum. It is the culmination of three years of planning and over a year of work for 100 or more people. The man behind the exhibit? Associate professor John Sabraw.

Professor Sabraw has been working at Ohio University for four years. During that time he has had a number of exhibitions, both here at OU and around the country. However SCALE is his first time doing an exhibition of this magnitude or subject matter.

“Most of the time I’m a painter…for however many years now I’ve been showing realistic paintings and realistic drawings of a variety of subject matters from figurative to still life…every show has actually been very different than each one in subject matter, but they have all been approached in a realistic manner.”

Professor Sabraw has had a lifelong interest in science, as well as activism. Around the time of the Iraq War it began to occur to him that “we just didn’t know each other as humans. They [Iraqis] were just people over there in some other country having bombs dropped on them. What do we care?” Despite his emotions, he was unable to find a way to express that idea through his art.

“I wasn’t finding a way through my paintings to get that message out. So I started thinking about our scale. The big questions. Where do we come from, what are we doing here? What is our responsibility?”

The SCALE exhibit is an attempt to communicate that while the Earth may seem huge, it is the responsibility of people to take care of it and their fellow humans. “If I could get people to just think about that idea, that has to make you feel about the size of a planet.”

Charcoal Milky Way

The feature piece of the exhibit, a 10.5' x 85’ handmade rendition of the Milky Way Galaxy, is displayed in the first room. Done completely in charcoal, the drawing is made in a way to display the vastness and beauty of the galaxy while showing the origins of human art: crude pictures on cave walls. “I wanted to use the first materials used to make art by man.”

In the center of the room is a pedestal with a single clear sphere 1cm in diameter with a speaker above it whispering information about the scale of the galaxy to the viewer. The purpose of the cube is to show that while space is infinitely large, it is almost entirely empty.

“Your basic density out there is one atom per cubic centimeter. If you actually leave the Milky Way Galaxy, you have a one in ten million chance of finding an atom in that cubic centimeter.”

The goal of the first room is to give the viewer the sense that they are a rare commodity in the universe, and that every other person is just as precious as they are. “I’m trying to get people to think of themselves as something that is really significant and special,” Sabraw said.

One Billion Stars

The second room of the exhibit features a large black tube that when finished, will replicate a telescope that has a single grain of sand blocking the view in the very center of the eyepiece. The idea is to show that something as small as a grain of sand can obscure galaxies.

Looking around the exhibit, the scrolls hanging around the room like wallpaper might appear to be sandpaper at first, but with a closer look the viewer can tell that the scrolls are in fact covered in completely random dots that represent stars. One billion stars in the room, to be exact. Professor Sabraw’s goal with this room is to give people “...a sense of how big a number [1,000,000,000] that really is, so when you hear 27,000,000,000 or 5,000,000,000 or 6,000,000,000 or 1,000,000,000 or whatever, then maybe it will have a little bit different sensibility for you.”

Interconnection

In the final room of the exhibit, viewers are presented with an animation depicting Earth with locations of major contributors to the project mapped out. The goal here is to show that the project is a massive collaborative effort that involved people from all over the world. Some prominent names include Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Aristotle and a number of scientists and artists that assisted Professor Sabraw in the completion of the SCALE exhibit.

“When you start understanding you share the planet, the universe with these people and we’re on a little tiny isolated boat that’s leaky. We’ve punched some holes in our boat and we’re leaking. We need to get together and plug the hole…It’s called connectivity and the idea is to have people maybe realize that you can’t separate our knowledge about our universe into one country.”

Coming Up Next

While the SCALE exhibit is still constantly under corrections and modifications, Professor Sabraw has begun to look to the future of his art. He intends to tour the SCALE exhibit around the country while still painting. He is also trying to modify the animation of the world at the end of the exhibit to be far more expansive, and is looking to work with Google Earth for help.

Once the SCALE exhibit is well on its way, Professor Sabraw is interested in taking on the task of creating a self-sustaining green artist’s colony. The catch is that he wants to do it in a city to further prove what is possible with cooperation.

The SCALE exhibit will be on display in the Kennedy Art museum for public viewing until December 16th, 2007.