The adjective “awesome” has been enfeebled by incessant application to the trivial: My maple creemee was awesome. That T-shirt is awesome. But awe itself remains a stirring emotional response to something truly grand or unfathomable; it may include a realization of insignificance in the face of a powerful force. Not coincidentally, the U.S. military refers to its strategy of rapid dominance as “shock and awe.”
Most of us might describe awe in more positive ways: a religious or spiritual experience; being moved by tremendous beauty, such as a majestic landscape or achingly eloquent music; wonderment at the unfolding cosmos. We are also awed by displays of human goodness or resilience in the face of misfortune.
A uniquely provocative exhibition at the Middlebury College Museum of Art explores this entire spectrum. Aptly titled “An Invitation to Awe,” it partitions the subject into “studios,” or categories, such as “The Natural World” and “Scientific Discovery.” As an introduction observes, “the challenges of our current moment suggest the adoption of a broader and more nuanced understanding of awe.”
What moment is more pivotal to the living than confronting the afterlife?
Guest curator Katy Smith Abbott, an associate professor in the history of art and architecture, engaged colleagues as well as nearly 70 students to develop concepts and select objects for the exhibit. Some of the students created short podcasts that visitors can listen to on headphones. These include, in the “Sacred Awe” studio, Yardena Gerwin’s 10-minute interview with Rabbi Sara Paasche-Orlow. Titled “Witnessing Awe,” it centers on the rabbi’s work with individuals nearing the end of life.
“At the moment of dying, it’s evident to the dying person that there is something holding the universe together,” Paasche-Orlow says. Indeed, what moment is more pivotal to the living than confronting the afterlife?
A similar theme from a different culture is presented in a bewitching image titled “Arrival.” It’s a still from New Zealander Lisa Reihana‘s video installation, “Tai Whetuki—House of Death Redux.” A tattooed woman, arms outstretched, seems to float through a setting that is equal parts woodsy and ethereal. “In Māori mythology, Hine-nui-te-pō is the goddess of dreams, as well as the spirit who welcomes the dead to the afterlife,” wall text explains. Here, the goddess is guiding a dead warrior “through an underworld where land and human are inextricably linked.”
An introduction to the studio “Vastness and Accommodation” notes that in the Middle Ages, awe manifested as darkness and fear of the unknown. But to contemporary psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, who study and write about awe, it is “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” Harrowing color photographs by Canadian Darren Ell, from his series “Surviving Refuge,” are presented in this section.
In one image, a mountain of orange life jackets impels viewers to “engage with the dire realities facing thousands of people displaced by war,” wall text reads. Knowing that these jackets had been occupied by desperate human beings, it’s inevitable to think also of those lost at sea.
The “Acts of Humanity” studio, assembled by students, is filled with mementos of sorrow as well as kindness. An enormous, vibrant panel from the National AIDS Memorial Quilt dominates this part of the gallery. A nearby color photograph by Jon Henry represents a more recent scourge. In “Untitled #35, North Minneapolis, MN,” a Black woman defiantly holds up her lifeless son. A wrenching pietà for our times, the image represents how mothers “bear the weight of their sons, as well as the weight of love, fear, grief, and the effects of systemic violence.” The photo powerfully speaks to the intractable challenges of gun crime, police brutality and racism.
Another photo represents a humane response to the inhumanity of war: In “Russia Ukraine War Refugees,” by Italian photographer Francesco Malavolta, baby strollers are lined up on a railroad platform in Przemysl, Poland, awaiting tiny escapees. “The specific gesture of strollers acts as a strong sign of solidarity between mothers,” the wall label reads, “symbolically eliminating borders in a time of widespread strife.”
A surprising section called “Awe of Sound” compels visitors “to think of how awe is experienced through senses other than sight.”
For a podcast titled “Awe, Music, and Community,” former student Rhys Glennon interviews Peter Amidon, director of Brattleboro hospice singing group Hallowell Singers. A sound sculpture by South Korean artist Yeseul Song invites visitors to don headphones and slowly wave their hands inside a tublike structure on the wall. It allows the user to feel and manipulate the “shape” of the sounds. Another interactive piece, “Sounding Sculpture,” by late American artist Harry Bertoia, is a forest of slender copper rods on a metal base. Wearing cotton gloves, visitors can engage with the piece to create cascading chimes.
“An Invitation to Awe” includes images of natural beauty, from an Albert Bierstadt painting of the American West to an “outdoor” excursion via virtual reality. Some entries are as unexpected as they are intriguing, such as a boxy, 19th-century quadrant electrometer, which “was used to measure the presence and magnitude of a charge,” and 21st-century photomicrographs of tears by Rose-Lynn Fisher. Who knew that a single tear could display “startling variations in shape and texture”?
The exhibit’s most mind-blowing component is a 71-minute film by Houston artist Dario Robleto, which the gallery screens multiple times per day in a darkened room. Visitors are advised to watch the whole thing. The poetically titled Ancient Beacons Long for Notice features two spacecrafts — Voyager I and Voyager II — that NASA launched in 1977. Both are now billions of miles away, traveling at 30,000 miles per hour, and have returned images from deep space including relative close-ups of Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus. This alone is an astounding achievement.
The heart of Robleto’s film — the third of a trilogy — is the Golden Record bolted to the Voyagers’ sides. The gold-plated copper disc is essentially an audio archive of life on planet Earth (as of the late 1970s), curated by a team led by astronomer Carl Sagan. It holds snippets of music from Ludwig van Beethoven to Blind Willie Johnson, sounds from the natural world, greetings to potential extraterrestrials in 55 languages, and other audio missives. Like a cosmic “message in a bottle,” the record is an enormous leap of faith that it will one day be received.
Robleto, who voices the film’s brilliant narrative, gives ample credit to creative director Ann Druyan, who would become Sagan’s wife. While collecting sounds from the Library of Congress, she also submitted — subversively — a recording of her own heart and brain waves, made as she contemplated an inaudible but foundational human expression: love. Robleto dubs it “a stowaway feminist street protest.”
Ancient Beacons is a riveting mélange of science and art, of technological prowess and human fragility. Ultimately, both the film and “An Invitation to Awe” are masterworks in communicating.
“The process of doing this,” Smith Abbott said, “gave me a second liberal arts education.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Art Review: ‘An Invitation to Awe,’ Middlebury College”
This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2024.
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