Galileo Project
Exhibition Statement by Victoria Gao, Curator
The Galileo project has been a long time in the making. It began over seven years ago with a conversation at the Vermont Studio Center, where Doug Bosch and Richard Whitten, colleagues in the Rhode Island College Art Department and long-time admirers of each other’s work, had adjacent studios. Both artists have a long history in their own works of drawing on scientific inspiration. Bosch frequently references 18th and 19th century scientists and scientific instruments in his sculptures, intentionally creating objects that look as if they may have a function but that soundly resist actual utility. Whitten’s illusionistic paintings open up whole worlds of wondrous analog machines, often catching an object mid-flight or a gear mid-turn.
At the Vermont Studio center, Bosch and Whitten realized that, by coincidence, they were both looking at the same scientific instrument from the collection of the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy. The Museo Galileo is not, as one might assume, a museum dedicated to the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, but a museum that has been dedicated to the history of science and a collection of scientific instruments over 450 years old. Bosch and Whitten ultimately settled on a selection of six scientific instruments, dating from the 17th through 19th centuries, that are housed at the Museo Galileo. Most of these instruments were designed to observe – stars, air currents, electricity, humidity. As the artists describe, “the instruments were selected for their shape, materials, proportions, function, and their captivating aesthetic appeal.”
The initial goal laid out by Bosch and Whitten was to create six artworks that each related directly to one of the selected instruments. Then, they were to create an additional six artworks that centered on imagined hybridized cousins that could easily be a part of the Museo Galileo collection. In the end, each artist researched, designed, and created artworks that remained true to their original goal but were imbued with the artists’ distinctive styles. Bosch and Whitten invited fellow Rhode Island College Professor Nancy Bockbrader to create this unique hand-bound exhibition catalogue for the Galileo Project Exhibition. A graphic designer and bookbinder, Bockbrader drew on the colors, textures, and analog techniques of 17th- and 18th-century Italian artists, printers, and type designers to produce this accordion-style book and accompanying clamshell case. The book’s covers, adorned with foil stamped text and imagery inspired by Bosch and Whitten’s artworks, draw a parallel to both the gold and brass materials used in the scientific instruments of the Museo Galileo and ornate Renaissance and Enlightenment book covers. In a similar act of referencing the original source materials, Bockbrader incorporated a faux gauge and a hidden inner compartment for an assemblage of folded paper structures in the book’s case. These attributes connect with Bosch’s and Whitten’s work to create an an exhibition publication that is simultaneously part of the exhibition it describes.
Doug Bosch’s twelve sculptures began as drawings that contemplated the shape vocabulary of the source instruments from the Museo Galileo. Having visited the museum in Florence several times, Bosch also considered objects that are housed in the same room as the source instruments, drawing connections only apparent to those who have stepped into the museum itself. As he started crafting his own sculptures, he intentionally allowed the objects to look a little clumsy, handmade, reminding the viewer that these are objects that specifically resist utility and machine-made perfection.
The seemingly random positioning of the different components of Bosch’s sculptures, especially in Inv. 2453f: Belted & Subdivided with Assorted Keys and Inv. 2453.7: Seekers (shown on pages 40–47), directly undermines the steady exactitude of the referenced object. The astronomical ring from the Museo Galileo consists of three concentric brass rings – one ring is inscribed with the degrees of a semi-circle, another with the names of the stars. Each inscription is intentional, and each movable component serves a scientific purpose. Bosch’s grouping of astronomical rings disassembles the three rings of the reference object, multiplies them, and scatters them across a base, which is painted to be reminiscent of the way historic scientific instruments are often displayed in museums. They appear random and disordered – but not unintentionally so. Instead, they look, for the viewer, like a complex three-dimensional puzzle that is meant to be put together in the mind’s eye to re-form the astronomical ring from Museo Galileo.
Relying on the imagination and the vision of the viewer is also a key facet of Richard Whitten’s paintings. His interpretation of the project was to create an imaginary catalogue of museum objects, with each panel painstakingly painted like the page of an illuminated manuscript. The finished set of twelve paintings, each 311 x 394 mm (15.5 x 12.25 in) – the same size as the bases of Bosch’s sculptures – form a dissected view of the catalogue, with each painting representing either a recto or verso of a page. Whitten brings in references from his own earlier paintings – a cigare volant, a tellurian – but each painting is also rich with symbolism that relates to the original scientific instruments and the Museo Galileo itself. Numerous crests can be found in the marginalia across the twelve pages, several of which contain five red balls and one blue ball and refer directly back to the Medici family, the famed rulers of Florence whose private collection of scientific instruments were the basis upon which the Museo Galileo was founded.
The Frontispiece of the painted “catalogue” also contains an image of the same astronomical ring that Bosch incorporated into his sculpture. Instead of being the main subject of the foreground of the painting, the astronomical ring is suspended in a back chamber, accessible only to the viewer by pushing past two crests – one Medici and one Habsburg-Lorraine – fixed to a platform. The viewer must enter into the world of the painting in order to access this key to the museum. Whitten’s symbols and references in the marginalia of each painting often relate to where he imagines the instruments to be used. For example, the white and beige backgrounds of “pages” 3: Polyhedral Dial: Inv. 2495 and 4: Anemometer: Inv. 732, invoke Arabic illuminated manuscripts. In each of Whitten’s paintings, the viewer moves these machines with their minds – rotating, pulling, twisting – without understanding or needing to understand what will result from such a machine.
In the Galileo Project, Nancy Bockbrader, Doug Bosch, and Richard Whitten have created a dialogue across media, time, and imagination—one that links contemporary art to centuries-old scientific inquiry. Drawing from the history and the visual language of the scientific instruments housed in the Museo Galileo, each artist interprets and reimagines these objects through the lens of their own practice. Bockbrader’s hand-bound catalogue provides a satisfyingly unique companion for the exhibition. Bosch’s sculptures, tactile and purposefully imperfect, suggest objects suspended between function and fiction. Whitten’s intricate paintings create a catalogue of invented devices, each that inhabits a specific, if unidentifiable place. Together, their works blur the boundaries between art, science, and history.
Victoria Gao, Director of the Bannister Gallery at Rhode Island College