This exhibition highlights the work of an artist who has spent over a decade interrogating how visual art can dialogue with science. Erica Bohm’s experimental practice approaches photography in its most basic literal translation: writing with light. Here, two of Erica Bohm’s bodies of work are in dialogue with Gund Associates’ selections from the museum’s permanent collection that use analogous languages—tracing environmental changes, interrogating art’s relationship with time, charting the moon, or mapping humanity’s impact on our surroundings.

For Bohm’s 2014-17 series Moonlight, for instance, the artist built different pinhole cameras to track the moon’s movement overnight, informed by telescopic research. Due to the earth’s rotation and the moon’s phases, the sunlight reflected by the moon resulted in interrupted lines on the paper, where phenomena such as eclipses are visible. While traditional photographers capture a “decisive moment,” Bohm’s practice responds to extended periods of exposure as well as changes to the atmosphere in which they are stored and exhibited. Alongside works from The Gund’s permanent collection, Bohm’s artwork presents a resource for understanding shifts in atmosphere and the elements, inviting us to examine the role of visual art in our empirical understanding of the environment and our role within it as humans.