Ala Ebtekar : The Sky of the Seven Valleys

Clouds take shape where earth’s elements meet the heavenly firmament. Floating through the air like translucent ships navigating the sea of sky above, their condensed liquid mass appears weightless above our terrestrial horizon, suggesting the visual and material limit of our earthbound human perspective underneath infinite fathoms of a celestial vault. Beyond this liminal zone between damp atmosphere and dry space, high clouds skim along the cosmic surface, often shrouding where planetary bodies sit high above. Once a cloud releases its water and returns back down to the telluric surface, the orbiting luminous spheres of the sun, moon, and stars appear.

Unfurling across seven canvases, Ala Ebtekar’s Zenith series reveals this cosmic dance of liquid and light through various modes of representation. At first sight, these human-scale canvases present substantial and saturated dark blue skies pinpricked by white lights. Commingling motion-filled substances across elemental categories (water, earth, air, and fire), these works capture the upwardly moving entanglement of atmospheric phenomena through naturally emanating forms and images. To fix an image of the cosmos using its own reflective matter, Ebtekar turned to two historical and culturally informed practices of human visuality: cyanotype printing and Islamic book arts. 

With cyanotype, Zenith expands upon the artist’s previous projects with the photosensitive reactive printing process using ready-made printed book pages (36 Views of the Moon, 2018) and hand-crafted ceramic tiles (Luminous Ground, 2023). Here, the plain-woven threads of cotton canvas were soaked in potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate to make the fabric reactive to the infrared or ultra-violet light of the electromagnetic spectrum. Over the span of one year each textile was laid down on the earthen ground and exposed to the radiating light emitted by the stars, moon, and sun rotating overhead. The entire course includes nineteen exposures with each panel composing approximately one year of moving light. In these resulting time-lapses of (seemingly) slow planetary movements within waves of deep stormy blue, Ebtekar captured the light of celestial fire and then fixed its image into our earthly terrain by washing the treated surface in water, extinguishing the photogenic chemical process. Cosmic scale is thus articulated onto the two-dimensional surface through natural materials and the electromagnetic radiating light waves of the planetary spheres themselves.

Experienced as one immersive work of bringing the cosmos down to the ground and stretching it across our field of vision, each panel yields an interstellar perspective from within the thick of earthly matter. Zenith shifts us from the terrestrial bias of our own ecological perspective and scale to grasp the celestial depths above. Each burst of white light, floating dot, and luminous marking records the momentary, physical contact of the infinite beyond onto our planet’s finite material surface. Viewing these cyanotypes invites contemplation of cosmic transcendence from familiar ground. Enmeshed within this atmospheric theater of blooming liquid and light, or material conjoining of water and fire, our embodied perspective is shifted from the terrestrial horizon to floating with the clouds along an azure expanse.

Such interweaving of earthly biosphere and celestial vault within the artwork continues through Ebtekar’s pictorial reference and representation of clouds. Stemming from the artist’s training in historical Islamic book arts and popular painting practices in Tehran, these depictions of tendrilled clouds became their own pictorial language. Incessant repetition of their traditional forms burned them into the artist’s field of vision whether awake or sleeping, and their curvilinear appearances in Zenith removes them from a human-transmitted art historical lineage into the heavenly firmament where they belong. The translucent images start with cyanotype UV-light exposure and a wash, followed by drying and stretching the canvas. Next, the process continues with the white charcoal under-drawing and painting. Swirling brushstrokes trace the bands of sinuous thin lines like white ribbons of a heavily skated upon ice rink, or Saturn’s spinning rings. Like planetary ring particles, clouds are likewise composed of water droplets and frozen ice suspended in motion. Such particle suspension is visible through the cyanotype solution’s deep Prussian blue as gauze-like fibrous sheaths of gestural movements in Ebtekar’s compositions. These whirling eddies twist almost like wind gusts, transporting liquid and clay earth particles across the woven canvas like the kinetic activity of air moving over the planet’s surface. As these billowing vitreous masses further sublimate the liminal boundary between earth and cosmos, what is left behind are impressions or marks made by a confluence of clouds and human activity. 

As the title of the painting series, “zenith” references the highest perceived point between the traveling arcs of stars and planets above and our surface-dwelling nadir. The English word emerged from a mistranslation nearly a millennia ago of the Arabic phrase “samt al-ras,” meaning the way or path over one’s head. Transmitted from Arabic through old Spanish, medieval Latin, then to Middle French and English, in astronomy “zenith” came to mean a cosmic apex above the observer. Besides humans, another living being with perceptive knowledge of the atmospheric limit between earthen ground and spiraling cosmos are birds. The poet Farid al-Din Attar’s famous twelfth-century poem The Conference of the Birds (“mantiq al-tayr”) and its allegorical journey of enlightenment was a popular subject within historical Persian Islamic book arts as the story intermixes the cosmic divine with earth’s biosphere enmeshed with creatures of all kinds. The exhibition title “The Sky of the Seven Valleys” references Attar’s poem while simultaneously suggesting a different field of perception emanating from another inhabitant of this planet, as their feathery wings soar through the cloudscapes high above our grounded horizon.