Review

"Wormhole Creation," Photographic Print.

Colby Sempek
Pocketfuls of Sky

Noon-7 p.m.

Carnegie Arts Center
601 S. Fifth Street
Leavenworth, KS
913.651.0765

Hours: Noon-7 p.m. Monday-Thursday, noon-5 p.m. Friday.
Runs through: Aug. 6.

Artist's site: http://www.colby-sempek.com
Gallery site: http://www.carnegieartscenter.org

True explorers cover interior as well as exterior spaces, discovering things about themselves as they range through new territories.

The best leave records and share findings that allow others to vicariously join them on both inner and outer expeditions.

Colby Sempek is in that latter category. His Pocketfuls of Sky, which has had its run at Leavenworth's Carnegie Arts Center extended through early August, is a photographic journal of sorts, documenting his explorations of space science  from an outsider's perspective.

After reading a few books on astronomy and astrophysics, I became frustrated, as someone who understands their world primarily in a visual manner, in trying to understand theoretical or unobservable concepts like calabi-yau shapes, gravitational waves, black holes, etc., Sempek writes. This project definitively describes these things in a simple visual way, the way I want to understand them.

That last clause is telling: Sempek, a graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute who is now pursuing his MFA at the University of New Mexico, isn't interested so much in pure hard truths as in his artistic and imaginative take on them.

That's to be expected from an artist who favors photography because, as he puts it,  I'm attracted to its potential to create illusions as opposed to its role as a document of truth. 

Some of the illusions are harder to spot than others: imaginary nebulae, for example. Others  — such as Wormhole Creation, today's featured image — are straightforward science-fiction imaginings.

(Sempek doesn't give away the end of this particular story, though: Is this a fantastic discovery, a breakthrough to deep space and/or time travel ... or an experiment gone horribly, apocalyptically wrong?)

In the end, of course, each viewer  must make his or her own explorations of, and take a subjective set of findings away from, Pocketfuls of Sky. That's both the challenge, and the fun, of this imaginative show.

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