b. 1980, Minneapolis
Lives and works in Minneapolis
Lindsy Halleckson’s You Are Sky is an exploration of atmosphere, space, and the illusionary boundaries created by us. Three complimentary sections offering interpretations of sight, sound, and temperature all serve to explore our perceptions of where feeling and places end and begin.
Lindsy Halleckson’s You Are Sky is an exploration of atmosphere, space, and the illusionary boundaries created by us. Three complimentary sections offering interpretations of sight, sound, and temperature all serve to explore our perceptions of where feeling and places end and begin.
My work evokes multisensory experiences heightened in solitude, creating a space that is quiet but also rich with emotion and memory. I’ve been thinking about separations—edges and boundaries that we create for ourselves. Most of us have psychological separations in the social and political realms of our lives, but we also create barriers between ourselves and global ecology.
When we think about the sky, we may think about it as a layer of the Earth way above our heads. But are there any real barriers between us and the sky? What we call the sky reaches right down to the ground that we stand on. We are actually breathing sky. The sky’s molecules fill our lungs and populate each of the cells in our bodies. We are sky.
Conversely, on the top side of our atmosphere, where does the sky end and outer space begin? We have scientific designations for the layers of this paper-thin cover that sustains life on this planet. Each of these layers has a distinct set of temperature, composition, and airflow. But if you were to take the viewpoint of an astronaut in orbit, would you be able to see an edge where space stops and Earth’s atmosphere starts? I imagine that as you approach the atmosphere, the hardness of its edge begins to fall away. It becomes a gradient with space that gradually merges together. The only hard edge is the ground.
Essentially, not only are we breathing sky, we are also in space.