GREENSBORO, NC.- Skyward includes the work of four artists for whom the skies are a source of inspiration and observation. Each uses this material to different ends, from tracking the movement of stars and the moon over extended periods of time to images that incorporate views “looking back” from the skies and personal representations of various constellations.

For a number of years, Sharon Harper has followed the movement of planetary bodies through long-exposures photographs generally titled with the location, date and duration of the image that is being captured. She works in a tradition going back to the late 1800s of artists exploring the boundaries of art and science. Harper employs a range of technologies—analog, digital, video, and high speed—that she pairs with lenses and telescopes. While the results may generate some scientific interest, they are resoundingly poetic and beautiful. Harper encourages us to think well beyond the now-tired binary of reality and perception, encouraging us instead to think beyond what we know.

Sharon Harper received her MFA in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, teaching photography, in the UNCG Department of Art from 2003 to 2005, and since then has taught at Harvard University, where she is now a Professor of Art in the Visual and Environmental Studies Program. Her work has been widely exhibited and collected in this country and abroad, and she is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships.

Karin Apollonia Müller’s series of photographs, Far Out, (2013) consists of images she altered from raw NASA data. Selections from two of the series’ three parts, Worldlights and Citylights, are included in the exhibition. The works look back from the skies toward earth, upending the more conventional practice of us looking toward the heavens. The compelling photographs offer us unusual viewpoints of civilization on our planet: the clustering of lights help to define landmasses and population densities, while they also create striking abstractions.

Karin Apollonia Müller was born in Germany in 1963 and moved to Los Angeles in 1995. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions both here and in Europe. Her work is in such collections as the Museum of Modern Art, NY; George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, among others. She is represented by Diane Rosenstein in Los Angeles and Julie Saul Gallery in New York, NY.

A conceptual approach to a long-held interest in astronomy marks the work of Demetrius Oliver. His enamel on paper drawings recall outdated modes of photography such as cyanotypes and photograms; they derive, however, from a map by French astronomer Charles Messier. In his digital prints, Oliver has inserted a round image of animal fur in the middle of a constellation chart: each pelt refers to a constellation named for that particular creature.

Demetrius Oliver earned his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine and held a yearlong residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His work has been shown in a variety of galleries and museums around the country, and it is represented by D’Amelio Terras, New York, NY, and Inman Gallery in Houston, TX.

Trevor Paglen has long been interested in the architecture and apparatus of surveillance. His large-scale “Reaper Drone” photographs recall the abstract paintings of Mark Rothko or J.M.W. Turner’s luminous seascapes. But, in Paglen’s case, the beauty of a work is subtly disturbed by the presence of a nearly invisible surveillance drone. He, too, turns the tables and puts us in the simultaneous act of viewing and being viewed. His black-and-white diptych pairs an image of the Anasazi Cliff Dwellings in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona (the Anastazi were star-watchers) with a long-exposure view of spacecraft and celestial objects orbiting the earth.

Trevor Paglen is an artist, geographer, and author, with an MFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD in geography from the University of California at Berkeley, where he currently works as a researcher. He has exhibited his photographs and other artworks at numerous museums and galleries including MASSMoca, North Adams, MA; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA.

Skyward is presented as part of The Globe and The Cosmos, a university-wide celebration of the 450th birthdays of William Shakespeare and Galileo Galilei.

The exhibition is on view at the Weatherspoon Art Museum from January 10 through April 19, 2015.