In the Astrology Orchestra, the system of astrology is used to map out the artist’s birth chart from the perspective of the planets in our solar system. Each chart is radically different from the next because of the planet’s position in space. These charts serve as a template for stringed instruments, each representing a different planetary perspective of the same moment in time. The instruments are tuned so that the note of the string at the diameter of each sculpture correlates to the frequency of the planetary spin. A metronome serves as the conductor for the performance as the performers circumnavigate through the zodiac cycle playing the planetary transits.
Instrument/Astrological Sign, Performer:
Sun/Leo Jennifer Boysen
Earth/Virgo, Katie Grinnan
Mercury/Gemini, Sandeep Mukherjee
Venus/Libra, Alice Könitz
Saturn/Capricorn, Sue Maing
Mars/Aries, Aiko Hachisuka
Jupiter/Sagittarius, Tim Rogeberg
Uranus/Aquarius, Margo Victor
Neptune/Pisces, John Williams
Pluto/Libra, Farrah Karapetian
Katie Grinnan lives and works in Los Angeles and received her MFA from UCLA in 1999. She has had solo exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria in New York, the Aspen Art Museum in Aspen, Colorado, and at the MAK Center in Los Angeles. Grinnan has been included in many group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Real World: The Dissolving Space of Experience at Modern Art Oxford in Oxford, England, and The Artist Museum at MOCA in Los Angeles. Her work is included in collections at MOCA, the Hammer Museum, and LACMA in Los Angeles, and she has been awarded a Guggenheim and Pollock-Krasner Fellowship. She is represented by Brennan and Griffin gallery in New York. At the heart of Grinnan’s work lies a fundamental interest in the relationship between sight and the kinesthetic and their resulting visual and structural translations.