For As Seen From the Surface, Bullock brings her archive to life – projecting small videos interspersed with diagrammatic drawings drawn from books and her videos/photographs, all in a geometric pattern that references the Didactic Chart. These galleries function as both observatory and library and works will be added throughout the exhibition’s run. Together the elements form a new cabinet of curiosities for the infinitesimal. There is symmetry in seeing the videos and drawings together as they tell a story of experience followed by the sometimes fruitless need to understand what just occurred. The shimmering graphite of the drawings catch the light, while the vellum’s transparency and buoyancy allow them to flutter as we pass by, like a leaf shaking in the wind. To complement these subtly didactic moments, Bullock occasionally adds text to her videos that may also feature in the drawings. One clip of an oil slick on a puddle (what Vladimir Nabokov once dubbed “asphalt’s parakeet”) is accompanied by the words, “In the microcosm of her own visual world she worshiped the macrocosm of the universe.”

The inclusion of “she” here offers the opportunity for Bullock to tell us her stories and to merge the personal with the universal. Previously her texts came from field guides and science books, but now her own observations intervene, such as “She stopped using one journal for ‘poetry’ and another for ‘facts.’” With this phrase, Bullock invites us in and reminds us, as Wallace Stevens wrote: “It is not every day that the world arranges itself into a poem.”

-Denise Markonish