Josiah McElheny. A Space for an Island Universe (English)

Josiah McElheny´s five part sculpture Island Universe (2008) is made from hand-blown glass and chrome plated metal. Two intersecting points of departure shaped it: current theories about the origin of the universe; and a group of chandeliers at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, designed in 1965 by the Austrian firm of J & L Lobmeyr and purportedly inspired by popular representations of the theory of the Big Bang, confirmed by scientific evidence that same year. While it somewhat resembles a group of chandeliers, McElheny´s sculpture functions as a scientific model of a multiverse. (In place of the Sixties’ notion of the Big Bang as a single originary explosion originating in a specific moment in time, many cosmologists today accept the notion of the multiverse: an eternal expansion of universes accelerating endlessly into infinity.) For McElheny, this cosmological theory offers a model which may be extended to other realms of contemporary thought and life, not least the socio-political.