hardcover artist book edition of 25+2 AP 7 x 7 inches 100 pages, full color signed and numbered on title page

Laura Splan's “A Guided Sublimation (Portals)” is a limited-edition artist book with images and text that build a relational matrix connecting micro and macro worlds. The poetic text and kaleidoscopic images are adapted from the narration and animations in Splan’s multisensory planetarium show originally commissioned by the Vanderbilt Museum Planetarium. “Portals” pairs the complete text of its narration with imagery from its animations. The layout of images is reminiscent of a “flip book” with hypnotic geometric bursts of color progressing through the pages.

Conventions of guided meditations and planetarium scripts are interwoven to create a liminal narrative situated between the biological and technological, sublime and absurd. The text intimately traces the epigenetic mechanisms of DNA that are influenced by environmental exposures such as pollution or trauma. An unfolding narrative traverses entanglements across space and time with aesthetic modalities conventionally used to represent the magnitude of the cosmos in a planetarium or to focus awareness on the body in meditation. Digitally layered and filtered 3D molecular models are paired with the script. Their metallic surfaces reflect AI-generated landscapes detectible in the fractal details of the patterns throughout the pages. Together, the images and text of “Portals” explore the complexities between what is invisible and in plain sight, nature and nurture, past and present.

Each hardcover book is the edition is signed and numbered by the artist on the title page.