Patricia Domínguez Chilean, b. 1984

Gemstones: Green Onyx; Rose Quartz; Peridot; Aquamarine; Topaz.

Domínguez received a souvenir from each of the sites she visited during her Simetría Residency: CERN, the ALMA Observatory and the La Silla Observatory. One of these souvenirs was a component from a sidereal clock. The three telescopes at La Silla are coordinated using sidereal time, a highly accurate system of timekeeping based on the earth’s rotation in relation to the fixed stars.

This small token from her time at the observatory became the material starting point to a sequence of increasingly fantastical and incorporeal images, Domínguez’s Electric Saga. Through these watercolour paintings, she describes unattainable desires, previously unimaginable, unlocked in her by the theoretical teachings of astronomers and quantum physicists at these facilities. She left the residency with an expanded understanding of our infinite connections across our universe, an awareness of the extreme limits of our perception, and a yearning to feel and decipher these connections.

In 'Me trago el reloj sideral [I swallow the sidereal clock],' Domínguez imagines a device that could expand our cosmological sensors. In the same way that the telescopes allowed her to see celestial bodies beyond our galaxy in real time, she imagined how she could ingest this technology and synchronise with these bodies, feel their rhythms and movements and register the light and radio waves they send our way.

The Electric Saga paintings play with the tropes and aesthetic of science fiction – a genre that simultaneously expands our imagination of the future and reveals real anxieties about our present. Here, Domínguez reinterprets the popular dystopian idea of microchips implanted into our bodies, not as tools to monitor and control us but ones to expand our own abilities to sense our surroundings.