Stars come to life in Sarasota Art Museum exhibit

Visitors don’t just look at the work of artist Anne Patterson. They become part of creations that hang and dangle around you. There will be more than usual for patrons to immerse themselves in with the sights and sounds of “The Truth of the Night Sky: Anne Patterson and Patrick Harlin.”

The show, on display at the Sarasota Art Museum through Sept. 29, is a collaboration with the Hermitage Artist Retreat, where Patterson, a multi-media artist, and Harlin, a composer and sound artist, first met more than a decade ago.

“She was the second person I met at the Hermitage. We would go swimming every day and talk about what we were up to and wanted to do,” Harlin said.

They are both lovers of nature videos, particularly “flocks of birds that create amazing shapes. We talked about it and said we should do something about murmurations,” he said. By coincidence they both ended up with Hermitage residencies at the same time and started discussing how to approach their idea.

Murmuration is the word used for the noise made by the flight of large groups of birds, usually starlings, in the sky, which create visual patterns and their own soundscape.

Patterson said she had already touched on the subject with a commission of a giant hanging sculpture for the Christ Church Cathedral in Cincinnati.

“I was creating, through metal shapes, birds and the phenomenon of the murmuration with brass and copper and silver birds,” she said. “The way they were hung gave the impression that they were swooping down and around a hanging cross and out a doorway.” Patterson said she wanted an original score for that piece in 2017.

Their new collaboration is all about the cosmos. She has created three different sculpture series that will take up different spaces on the third floor of the museum, all accompanied by Harlin’s score.

“One room is a series of shooting stars, and then there is the tree of hope and then Celestial Orbs,” she said. A fourth room will feature her signature ribbons, that may remind some of an earlier piece she created at the Ringling Museum called “Pathless Woods.”

The visual creations are matched with Harlin’s composition “Earthrise.”

“Remember that iconic photo of the Earth over the horizon of the moon. It was a collective epiphany for humanity, contextualizing ourselves in the grander universe,” Harlin said. “In the middle of the pandemic, as a composer, everything ground to an instant halt. Travel stopped, and something popped up online where you could apply to go to space as an artist, and with me loving travel...”

His wife was “less than thrilled of the prospect of me being sent up in one of Elon Musk’s Space X rockets, but the idea is you could create something that would give us perspective on the journey,” he said. “The tie-in is with the three astronauts who took the first trip to the far side of the moon. When they came back, they said you should send artists, poets, people who could have captured the experience.”

Harlin has created a roughly 20-minute piece of music and sound to accompany the visual work by Patterson, with each room taking just a few minutes to experience.

“You start at Earth looking up at the night sky with a sense of awe, then quickly the pieces blast off or lift off,” Harlin said. “It’s a programmatic journey to the moon, weightlessness, the set of emotions you would experience.”

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He said he never intended to write something about COVID, “but the sense of isolation and disconnect from other people struck me, and if you went to space, everything you love is back on Earth. I love travel where you can connect with other people.”

Patterson said it was a true collaboration between them. Harlin wrote music before she created any sculptures, and she mentioned what parts of the music would work with her creations. “It’s a hopscotch back and forth,” she said.

The exhibit is running concurrently, at least until July, with “Impact: Contemporary Artists at the Hermitage Artist Retreat.” The show, curated by Dan Cameron, features work by 10 artists who have enjoyed residencies at the Hermitage over the last two decades.

‘The Truth of the Night Sky’

A creation by Anne Patterson and Patrick Harlin. Through Sept. 29. Sarasota Art Museum, 1001 S. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. 941-309-4300; sarasotartmuseum.org

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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Artists celebrate nature in Sarasota Art museum exhibit