Double Horizon is an immersive three-screen video installation that envelopes the viewer in artist Lia Halloran’s portrait of Los Angeles. The video footage was shot from cameras mounted to a plane piloted by Halloran as the artist was learning to fly. The flipped and mirrored footage presents the city and surrounding natural areas as kaleidoscopic abstractions, reflecting the artist's experience of her home city altered by the new scale and perspective offered by her flight experiences.

Scored with an original musical composition by Allyson Newman, the installation explores and transforms the constructed and natural landscapes of the Los Angeles Basin as part of Halloran’s ongoing investigations into the physical, psychological, and scientific explorations of space.

Lia Halloran often incorporates science and nature to create projects that draw from scientific materials, historical influences, and identities. She has participated in a wide range of interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists and architects including an upcoming book with Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne about the “warped side of the universe.” She lives in Los Angeles where she is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, and is an Associate Professor at and Chair of the Art Department at Chapman University, teaching courses that explore the intersection of art and science.

In this interview, C.O.L.A. 2021 Visual Art Fellow Lia Halloran discusses the inspiration and research behind her largest work to date, “The Sun Burns My Eyes Like Moons”, and how its layering and processes of cyanotype, photographic negatives and positives and various mark making continues the artist’s ongoing interest in bringing scientific concepts, inventions, and experiences into a contemporary art setting. With its consuming scale, material exploration and spirit of discovery, Halloran expands notions of time and space to create a “temple to the sun.”

Explore the intersections of art and science through the practice of individual artists who weave science, technology, and methods of discovery in their practices. The artistic process, much like the scientific process, is a form of inquiry vital to learning—an open-ended process of investigation, speculation, imagination, and experimentation. We’ll highlight artists who clarify the reciprocal relationship between art and science and how it can inspire a deeper understanding of the world.

Join Lumen and curator Stephen Nowlin for a seminar focused on the SKY exhibition at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California.

During the seminar, we will hear from curator Stephen Nowlin as he introduces the exhibition. We will then hear presentations from artists Laura Parker, Rebeca Méndez, Lia Halloran and Carol Saindon.

Featuring an immersive, three-screen projection of the same title, Double Horizon reflects the artist's ongoing investigations of the body's relationship to space in three simultaneous, large-scale, aerial views of the greater Los Angeles landscape.