Ashley Zelinskie: Twin Quasar
2024
Ashley Zelinskie, still from Twin Quasar, 2024
Ashley Zelinskie’s Twin Quasar is a three-dimensional artwork and space in the Whitney Museum Virtual Landscape that intertwines science with art history, building on the artist’s eight-year coordination with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope team and discussions with Tim Rawle, a scientist at the European Space Agency. The work uses two pieces from the Whitney Museum’s collection — László Moholy-Nagy’s painting Space Modulator (1938–1940) and Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne’s watercolor Compotier II (1938) — as sources and turns them into navigable 3D models, drawing parallels between phenomena in physics and the artists' exploration of space and form. When viewers approach the 3D models of the original works, the forms depicted in them reveal themselves as protruding from the virtual canvas, becoming layered in three-dimensional space and allowing viewers to navigate through the abstract shapes. The experience replicates the effects of gravitational lensing, a cosmic event occurring when massive objects such as black holes, galaxies, or dark matter bend light around spacetime, creating natural lenses that both magnify and distort. Gravitational lensing was first observed at an observatory in Arizona where scientists saw the light of a quasar — an extremely luminous galactic object — through a galaxy, and it appeared as though there were two quasars.
This artwork is best experienced on a desktop device. It can also be experienced in the Apple Vision Pro, allowing viewers to dynamically adjust their immersion between virtual and physical realities.
Technical development for Twin Quasar is provided by James Tunick: CEO The IMC Lab
Ashley Zelinskie (b. 1986) is a Brooklyn-based conceptual artist employing media as vehicles in service of underlying concepts. Her works span a variety of media, from sculpture, canvas and print works to digital art, VR, and holograms. Each artwork is created using technologies such as 3D printing, computer-guided laser cutting, satellite plating technology, and gaming engines. Her work focuses on visualizing data in abstract forms and finding new and interesting ways to describe complex ideas. Ashley’s work has been featured by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vice, Popular Science, Space.com, and Hyperallergic. Her work forms part of the permanent collection of the US Department of State Art in Embassies Program, has been exhibited at Sotheby’s New York, ArtScience Museum in Singapore and Art Center Nabi in Seoul. Ashley is a former resident of New Inc., the New Museum’s Art and Technology Incubator, and the Shapeways x Museum of Art and design “Out of Hand” exhibition residency. She is currently working in coordination with NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Smithsonian and is a member of Onassis ONX XR studio in New York City.
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