Saw the Splendor
Saw the Splendor was inspired by David Lynch’s poem Dark Splendor and its closing line: “All around, and reaching out into the deep darkness, he saw himself.” From this image, Harruthoonyan develops a vision of a new world constructed through a mythical panspermia: energy existing throughout the universe is redistributed by asteroids and comets, while iron released by a dying star enters the birth process of a cell.
The project reimagines the history of the artist’s family in Armenia, Iran, and Italy through three different lenses: a telescope, a microscope, and the artist’s imagination. Harruthoonyan hand-manipulates and collages his black-and-white negatives, weaving together the familiar and the foreign. He connects this process to his childhood experience of being pushed to reconsider language and identity.
Within the images, the gene of the “turritoposis Dohrnii”, described as the immortal jellyfish, becomes an ever-developing landscape; a young girl swallows a star; and abstract creatures move through constellations and space dust. In the final silver gelatin prints, the artist brings together the most majestic and minuscule of the Earth’s metamorphoses in images of the birth of new worlds.
Harruthoonyan’s past becomes a source for visions of a new Earth. Bluebirds, described as ancient symbols of love and happiness, replace distant stars, while the Van Allen belt becomes an invisible circle connecting the realms of astronomy and biology. The ongoing creation, destruction, and recreation of energy is compared with memories of the places where families are born and reborn across generations. Translated into auditory waves, this movement is described as a circle of birds chirping, suggesting that limited ways of perceiving may keep us from experiencing new worlds beyond the stories that have defined our past.