We are proud to announce that Drift: Art and Dark Matter, edited by Sunny Kerr, Director of the Agnes Etherington Gallery at Kingston University, Ontario/Canada, has been honored with the 2024 Galleries Ontario Prize for Book Design, recognizing outstanding achievement and artistic merit across Ontario’s public art gallery sector. Celebrated for its exceptional design and production, this book embodies the highest standards of artistic publishing.
To mark this occasion, we are making Drift available as a free PDF download, in addition to the print edition.
What Do We Desire from the Imperceptible?
Four artists—Nadia Lichtig, Josèfa Ntjam, Anne Riley, and Jol Thoms—were invited to journey deep underground to SNOLAB, a world-leading astroparticle physics research facility, to think with dark matter: an unseen substance that exerts a gravitational pull on everything. According to observational data, without this “dark” matter, galaxies would fly apart.
Given the contours of such a known unknown, the artists explore the how and why of physics and art as interrelated practices. Their widely varied and challenging responses range from new kinds of sensitivity and poetic freedom to questions about the nature of knowledge itself. Through interdisciplinary inquiry, they create works that link the scientific exploration of dark matter to a far-reaching care for what has not yet been sensed. Could this work inspire stealthy solidarities of curiosity across (and despite) the traditional boundaries of art and science?
About the Book
Edited by Sunny Kerr, Drift: Art and Dark Matter features contributions by Emelie Chhangur, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sunny Kerr, Nadia Lichtig, Art McDonald, Josèfa Ntjam, Anne Riley, and Jol Thoms. Designed by K. Verlag with Wolfgang Hückel & Katharina Tauer, the publication reflects the spirit of experimental research and interdisciplinary exchange that defines both artistic and scientific exploration.
The print edition is available for purchase, and the free PDF can be downloaded here.