WIZARD LAB is pleased to present Meeting the Universe Halfway, a solo exhibition by Sarah Ciracì, opening on May 13th. Taking its title from physicist and philosopher Karen Barad’s landmark 2007 book, the exhibition brings together new works in video, lenticular photography, holographic film, and installation, whose common thread is to interrogate the limits of perception and knowledge.
For over three decades, Ciracì has traced the uneasy relationship between human experience, technology, and the accelerating pace of scientific change. In the body of work conceived for this exhibition, this unease takes the form of a sustained engagement with quantum physics and its philosophical implications: the idea, shared by physicist David Bohm and theorist Karen Barad alike, that the world is not a collection of separate things waiting to be observed, but an entangled, indivisible whole that is always already in the act of becoming — an idea for which Barad coined the term “intra-action.”
At the center of the exhibition is a large-scale lenticular photograph — a work that is, by its very nature, resistant to a single, fixed reading. As viewers move before it, the image shifts, making visible another key concept of the show: the importance of point of view. The lenticular surface enacts, in purely optical terms, one of the central arguments of Barad’s philosophy and Bohm’s physics alike — namely, that what we perceive is never independent of the position of the beholder, and that reality does not hold still for the observer.
A second major work takes its formal cue from Lucio Fontana’s Spatialist cuts. Where Fontana cut through the canvas to expose the void beyond the picture plane, Ciracì works with holographic film, a material that holds light itself as its subject. Depending on the angle of incidence and the quality of light in the room, the work reveals and conceals shifting iridescent fields that cannot be fully captured, photographed, or fixed.
What connects these two works is a shared concern with the boundary between knowledge and its limits, between what an image reveals and what it necessarily withholds in relation to one’s point of view. Barad writes that reality is not independent of our exploration of it, but neither is it simply a matter of our choosing what to see. Ciracì’s practice inhabits this precise tension: her works do not illustrate scientific ideas, but short-circuit them. To encounter her work is to experience perception as an event: partial, entangled, always incomplete, and in the process of unfolding.
Meeting the Universe Halfway is accompanied by a critical text written by the artist and Gabriela Galati.