island universe

I was thankful for the chance to direct the pirate Guybrush Threepwood around the “Monkey Island” universe again.

Her “Island Universe,” for example, a stunning wall-sized mosaic composed of smokey chunks of charcoal at the Ford Foundation in New York, renders the seven continents as a horizontal daisy-chain of land masses.

“Island Universe” was inspired by R. Buckminster Fuller’s “Dymaxion Map” that peeled the globe like an orange, she explained, and sought to undo our cultural biases based on north and south.

Edwin Hubble, the astronomer who first identified an “island universe” beyond our own galaxy, described astronomy as a history of receding horizons: The farther we look, the bigger the universe gets.

Astronomy gets much of the credit for decentralizing the role of humans in the story of the cosmos, but just as Edwin Hubble placed our island universe in deep space, the geologist James Hutton placed us in deep time, gawking in awe in 1788 at the chasms of history that confronted him in the rocks at Siccar Point on the east coast of Scotland.