“Night Gallery is pleased to announce Blue State, a group exhibition featuring the work of Cameron Crone, Cynthia Daignault, Paul Kremer, Divya Mehra, Monique Mouton, Elizabeth Marcus-Sonenberg, and Elise Rasmussen. Blue State explores the invention of “blueness” through various historical narratives, examining the role of the color blue as a catalyst for geographic and technological discovery. The starting point for this exhibition was Elise Rasmussen’s study of the cyanometer, a device created by 18th-century Swiss scientist and alpine enthusiast Horace-Bénédict de Saussure to measure the blueness of the sky. Saussure’s apparatus would prompt the first expedition to the summit of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps. Once the essence that inspired scientific pilgrimage, blueness is now itself a geographic measuring instrument, serving as a shorthand to map political constituencies across the American landscape. District by district, blueness blankets a matrix of values under a single shade of establishment liberalism. A desire for exactness, for natural blueness rich in detail and meaning, has given way to its opposite: blueness as projection, a tool of blurring and false ascription. Blue acts as not as an organizing principle but as an organizing force, one that points us at once to the paradoxes of discovery and repression, of global apocrypha and intimate secrets, of the joy of nature and its dissolution into the ether.”
