"starting with the clarity of high-definition photography, we break it down - zooming in, smoothing, revealing the texture of digital noise - until a simulacrum of perception is presented. Vision isn’t a camera. The image is made in your head.” - Doug and Mike Starn
HackelBury presents A Tragedy of Infinite Beauty, a solo exhibition by American artists Doug & Mike Starn.
The twins present new works which reflect on impermanence, perception, and the tension between beauty and destruction. The two series on view, Under the Sky and Everything Is Liquid, explore the overwhelming yet often unnoticed forces - atmospheric, emotional, geological, and cultural - which shape our lives.
The Starns believe that everything is interconnected, interdependent and in constant flow - reflecting the dynamic forces of nature and the passage of time. Skies drift and billow, oceans crash, mountains rise — each moving at a different pace, from the immediate and fleeting to the glacial and imperceptible. From this perspective of shifting landscapes, the work pulls us inward through their intricacies of surface and gestural mark-making.
Created using hand-coated papers, photographic fragments, adhesive, varnish, wax and pigment, the works resist classification. Photographs dissolve into paintings taking on the presence of sculptural objects. Their surfaces recall the carved and inked textures of Japanese woodcuts, particularly those rooted in Buddhist print traditions. These early prints were devotional objects made through repetition and touch, shaped by time and intention. The Starns draw on this spirit through their own layered process, where images are assembled, erased and remade — interrupting detail, smoothing tonal range, scraping away form, until what remains is an image which is felt as much as seen.
In the Under the Sky series, the Starns create objects of something which we always see but cannot touch — a contemplative space to reflect on the harshness of our humanity.
“The cloud is the inevitable thought, the thing with no permanent shape, drifting through the clarity of blue and silent mind. As the cloud changes continually, the watcher only watches it until losing interest, and as awareness of it slips by, the thought’s gone out of sight. They always will be — old, worn, and always new.” - Doug & Mike Starn
Everything is Liquid also explores transformation, the idea that everything is fluid and constantly changing. What we perceive is not fixed, but shaped by memory, experience and attention. For the Starns, vision is not a passive act, rather an active process, taped together moment by moment, formed and reformed as we move through the world. As with the landscapes they depict, we too are fluid, evolving, incomplete.
The exhibition title, A Tragedy of Infinite Beauty, from the artists’ own writing reflects on the sky as a symbol of sublime indifference: ever-present, immeasurably beautiful, and entirely unmoved by human suffering. Yet, within this indifference, the works register an urgent emotional resonance - one which speaks to vulnerability and the fragile act of seeing.
“The Sky covers and continues at all times and in all places, covering us, over us. With its beauty, the horror we create on each other is made all the more horrific. It’s a tragedy of infinite beauty with no regard of our never-ending war waging and the oppression of each other. The Sky is completely, and utterly, oblivious.
But the beauty of the sky both shames and inspires. The situation is our own making, and the sky is ours... taking cover under its beauty, it’s beauty to strive for, try to live up to it, to see our reflection in it, recognize it.
It’s a beautiful day - be a friend to the weak and love justice. All the violence and suffering of humankind. Nature doesn’t even notice it” - Doug & Mike Starn
