Andrea Guskin: Unfurling

March 29 – May 4, 2024

Andrea Guskin works across the disciplines of photography, installation, and painting to create objects, images, and spaces where the familiar converses with the existential. She explores the act of unfurling as a way of seeking knowledge. Through the use of light and spice, her work reflects research ranging from quantum physics to her ancestry. 

Fascinated with recent efforts to read an ancient scroll using a particle accelerator beam, Guskin began researching the structures related to quantum physics–from the Large Hadron Collider to quantum entanglement—and creating light installations in the Mills College Greek amphitheater. In the resulting photographs, the distorted internal structures of the accelerators became voids of possibility and a contemplation on the fragility of existence. 

Guskin carried these explorations into the dark room, creating photogram spice portraits of her family’s ancestral background. She used her breath to move the combinations of spice across the paper. Through exposure to light, the tiny particles allude to the expanse of outer space—drawing a connection between the intimate, the everyday, and the vast.