Oh, Be a Fine Girl/Guy, Kiss Me!, an exhibition inspired by the legacy of “Harvard Computers,” is set to open at Gaep on May 17.

The Harvard Computers were a team of women, math whizzes, devoted stargazers, and later physics and astronomy majors, hired beginning with the 1880s by the Harvard Observatory to study its growing photographic glass plate collection.

The show, the artist’s second solo one with the gallery, is titled after the mnemonic used as a way to remember the star classification system OBAFGKM (also known as the Harvard spectral classification).

The exhibition features almost 40 new photographs and objects. The works can be divided into five groups based on the artist’s chief concerns: spectroscopy, birefringence, full-spectrum photography, photoelasticity, and light-reflecting landscapes.

From photographic maps of the sky to a large object inspired by a fictional “slow glass” through which light takes a year to pass, the exhibition “encapsulates a methodical attempt at expanding our vision beyond the naked eye and our curiosity beyond the familiar.”

Mihai Plătică graduated with a degree in Photography from the Art and Design of Cluj-Napoca, the city where he lives and works. He took part in the exhibition Suddenly Clear with Diana Popuț at the Art Museum in Cluj, and in Departures From the Sphere, a group exhibition part of the European co-production Both Ways, part of EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF2020, Trieste). His first exhibition with Gaep was Alpher-Bethe-Gamow in 2021.

(Photo: Mihai Plătică, Photoelastic Stress Glass Plate Mountain 4, 2024, courtesy of the artist and Gaep)

simona@romania-insider.com