You, Me, and Infinity is a large-scale piece that explores eight levels of scale from the very small to the very large, inspired by the 1977 Charles and Ray Eames film, The Powers of Ten. The work is rich with iconography related to personal and historical scientific discoveries, anchored by the human body as a central theme. Conversations with Caltech scientist and Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne informed the imagery within the quantum scale of the very small and the moment of the Big Bang that created vacuum fluctuations when ‘nothing’ became ‘somethings’. The inclusion of the artist’s young children connects the piece to the shifting scale of the human body during childhood, while the alignment of the Moon and Sun during a solar eclipse symbolizes cosmic balance. The artwork also honors key astronomical discoveries, such as Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s work with Cepheid variable stars and Edwin Hubble’s revelation of galaxies beyond the Milky Way by including imagery of local galaxies Andromeda and the Small Magellanic Cloud. Lines mimicking etchings found on Viking’s Golden Record emphasize the directions and location of earth’s place in the cosmos in relation to nearby quasars. Finally, subtle gravitational waves in the background pay tribute to LIGO, and the groundbreaking work that has revolutionized our understanding of the universe.

This work was commissioned for The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time, Art and Science Collide and is installed at the Caltech exhibition, Crossing Over, located in the historic Dabney Lounge.

Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020 is the first exhibition of its kind. Spanning one hundred years — from 1920, when Caltech assumed its current name, to the present — it explores the rich imagery in the institute’s historic collections and compliments it with contemporary artworks. The exhibition unfolds across Caltech’s campus in six outdoor and indoor venues, some rarely seen by the general public. It features scientific drawings, paintings, photographs, films, instruments, molecular models, and rare books from the histories of Caltech and JPL, which Caltech operates for NASA. Three interconnected thematic sections — The Infinite Lawn, Time Stream, and Powers of Ten — take viewers from the “universe without” (stars, moons, planets, and galaxies) to the “universe within” (cells, genes, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles), with unique installations by critically-acclaimed artists Lita Albuquerque, Jane Brucker, Lia Halloran, Shana Mabari, Hillary Mushkin, and Helen Pashgian rounding out the singular display.