Night Studio: Temporal Dislocations

Montage prints created from images of the night sky— our contemporary exposures combined with those from the Harvard Observatory Collections (with permission)—made on the same day in history. A durational project in three parts.

Night Studio: Temporal Dislocations (Obscure Traces) — Project Description

We are visual collaborating artists, Ann Burke Daly (Conceptual Artist) and Marion Belanger (Lens-Based Artist). We use found negatives and text interlaced with our own negatives and writing, in speculative narratives about non-linear time, climate change, weather, sleep states, historic women astronomers, shifting subjectivity, and collaboration itself. Our project uses documents from the past, drawn from the Harvard Astronomical Glass Plate Collection (with permission), marked and re-marked by generations of women working across visual culture and STEM, which we montage with our own exposures and markings. The finished piece is a new document that references time-travel, fact, fiction, and wonder. Each work represents one day multiplied across historic time. We print these 36” x 45” works on rice paper (Obscure Traces). We also have distinct series for each equinox and solstice of 2025 (Seasonal Marks), and for each day (365 Days). These are bleed prints, the size of letters.

We are influenced by the life path of Vera Rubin, an astronomer best known for verifying the existence of dark matter. We are equally motivated by the many “Harvard Women Astronomical Computers” who worked in the late 19th and 20th centuries on the physics calculations and visual records (glass plates) of astronomical events documented through the Harvard and other telescopes. We honor them through our titles. A notational co-journal, Weather Reports, is part of our process. This notational and everyday aspect of Night Studio connects us to our forebears, whose notations on glass negatives transformed images that we now, in turn, transform. In our activities, intimacy and excess attention and touch—handwork—link us to the Harvard Women Astronomical Workers. The vast cosmos is where we direct ourselves in this moment, which feels like an aporia for the environment and all species. We find the smallness of the known universe astonishing. 

Can we create a body of conceptually rigorous artwork—rich in materials and methods of making—that speaks to a desire for opacity and hermeticism, in which mystery is valued, and our transformations from the archive are accepted as obscure traces; objects of meditation, chance encounters—acts of collaborative non-mastery?

Project Short Description:
A collaboration by Daly+Belanger begun in 2024; a project of multiple series, exhibited as temporal segments. Our process involves researching astronomical files of the night sky and using these historical documents, interlaced with our own photographic images and text, in speculative narratives about time, weather, sleep disturbances, dreams, historic women astronomers, subjectivity, and collaboration itself. There are three distinct series: Obscure Traces; 365 Days; and Seasonal Marks (for each equinox and solstice).