All Around You
Peter Bahouth and Nikki Starz are sculpting a universe that will fit in the palm of your hand
By Wyatt Williams | Photos by Dustin Chambers
Indoor Interplanetary Journey
On a Friday morning in July, the artists Nikki Starz and Peter Bahouth let me see a spaceship arrive at a faraway planet. This interplanetary journey happened inside Starz’s studio on the ground floor of the Goat Farm Arts Center in Atlanta. The room was cramped with atypical supplies for space travel: buckets of paint, scraps of wood, half-finished cups of iced coffee.
“So, this is scene six,” Bahouth said, pointing at a flat table supporting the miniature rolling hills of a pleasant landscape, an undulating curtain of cotton balls mounted on chicken wire, a complicated terrace of PVC pipe and wiring holding all of this in place. At first glance, it was a simple diorama, the kind of thing that, with a few curtains, wouldn’t look out of place at a natural history museum. Then they cut overhead lights, flicked on a rig of flashlights and precisely placed spots, and hung a retro-futuristic spaceship in the air. Standing at the right vantage, I saw the scene: a rocket careening through tumultuous, dramatic clouds over a dangerously craggy ground and headed to a glowing city in the distance. Here was another world created inside the one that we were already standing in.
“A lot of science fiction is interested in colonization or fighting the other. There’s a touch of racism and manifest destiny in those stories,” Bahouth says.
Miniature Worlds
For the past couple of months, Bahouth and Starz have been doing exactly that: making big visions out of miniature worlds. Though they’ve been busy building these room-sized sculptural installations for months, the finished project will fit in your hand, just seven stereoscopic slides illustrating a narrative that Bahouth has titled Birth of a Red Planet. As with Bahouth’s previous photography, each slide will be placed inside of a mounted viewfinder that illuminates the scene in three dimensions. You may remember the View-Master as a childhood toy, that iconic red plastic stereoscope that illuminated 3-D images of floating castles and looming mountains. Birth of a Red Planet is a project that draws on that kitschy history, appropriating the style into a contemporary allegory of environmental apocalypse and escape.
Some of Bahouth’s inspiration came directly from the Adventures of Sam Sawyer, a classic View-Master reel that tells the story of a young boy traveling in space. Bahouth, a toy collector, started thinking about how he could create a contemporary homage to that work through a series of seven stereoscopic photographs. “A lot of science fiction is interested in colonization or fighting the other. There’s a touch of racism and manifest destiny in those stories,” Bahouth says. The narrative he imagined would be something like the reverse: a small boy named Henry escaping a polluted and ecologically devastated Earth and heading out into space. “He’s looking for a safe place for himself,” Bahouth says.
Sharks With Unicorn Horns
At the time that Bahouth conceived of Red Planet, he knew he wouldn’t be able to realize it himself. His previous photography has focused primarily on portraiture. To figure out how to create narrative scenes of space travel and distant planets, he’d need a collaborator. That’s when the artist David Baerwalde introduced Bahouth to Starz.
Bahouth and Starz are an unusual pairing. Starz is formally trained in sculpture. In the few years since earning her BFA, she’s been the recipient of honors from the Forward Arts Foundation and the Creatives Project. Her work often finds a kind of whimsical humor in natural forms: underwater scenes populated by sharks with unicorn horns, a group of hairless animals in birthday hats. The precise realism of her style gives her sense of humor an edge.
Bahouth is entirely self-taught as a photographer. Though he has been shooting stereoscopic photographs for fifteen years, his primary career has been running environmentally-focused non-profits, including years as the president of Greenpeace and the executive director of the Turner Foundation. He recently left that work to focus on photography full-time.
In the months since being introduced, Bahouth and Starz have dived headfirst into the work. She left her job at Malone Fabrication to focus on Red Planet full time. To create each photograph, Bahouth would describe a scene to Starz, who then began sketching and building a set around his ideas.
For Starz, creating work to be seen from a single camera’s perspective represented an unusual challenge. “I’m always thinking in the round,” she says. “I’d build something that would look good when I walked around it, but then I would see it through the camera and realize how much needed to be changed.” Rather than looking to sculpture, she says she often thought of Renaissance landscape paintings and the way that layers of oil created a depth of field.
Inevitably, they’d run into another artist or production designer or photographer, someone with a different background who could approach the problem from a new perspective.
Other times, Starz and Bahouth say they solved problems by simply walking outside of the studio and wandering the Goat Farm property. Inevitably, they’d run into another artist or production designer or photographer, someone with a different background who could approach the problem from a new perspective. The sets became so elaborate that the project outgrew Starz’s studio and expanded into Bahouth’s home, where they took me next.
Stereoscopic Time Travel
In the yard behind Bahouth’s home are a set of tree houses built from found materials and connected by rope ladders. They’re a calmly beautiful sight, which is probably why so many magazines have dropped in to take pictures of them over the years. He recently listed the tree house on Airbnb and has been overwhelmed with the response. He’s booked through the end of the summer. “I’m kind of just a concierge these days,” he says.
Inside his main house, though, is the evidence of a project that is taking over their lives. Where the kitchen table used to be, there is now a robotic control room. Where a dining room might have been, there is a shuttle traveling through deep space. Nevermind the mess, they’re both more concerned about meeting deadlines to exhibit the work at Art Southampton in New York and the Hagedorn Foundation Gallery in Atlanta.
Creating the three dimensional qualities that defined View-Master works like Adventures of Sam Sawyer isn’t a textbook procedure. While there were masters of the form, like Florence Thomas who made Sam Sawyer, little is known about their methods and practices. Her work wasn’t considered art at the time; just commercial entertainment. Bahouth and Starz have essentially invented their techniques as they’ve worked.
Sitting there in his living room, Bahouth explains that stereoscopic photography goes back to the earliest photographs, “In the 1860s when photography was first being developed, biologists were first understanding how we see: two images come in upside down and they go to this unit in our brain and they fuse. So, the earliest photographers were playing with stereoscopic techniques.”
A stereoscopic photograph is two images from slightly different perspectives. When processed by our eyes at the right focal length, the image reproduces the depth of field that our eyes recognize as three-dimensional. Like 3-D films, the style hit a peak as a popular commercial gimmick in the 1950s. Millions of ViewMasters and corresponding reels were sold as children’s toys; at the same time cameras were sold to hobbyists, including Bahouth’s father. When Bahouth discovered a trove of his father’s 3-D photos, mostly family snapshots. Looking at them, Bahouth found that a stereoscopic photograph could do something for him that two dimensional ones couldn’t.
For the moments that one spends with a stereoscopic photograph, the rest of the world and the other images in it are put on hold.
Our consumption of photography is largely passive. We see billboards or thumb thoughtlessly through the pages of a magazine. When we pull up one photograph on the internet, we’re often greeted by two or three more fighting for attention above, beside, and below it. Even in a gallery, we cannot help but see the photographs hanging on the walls. Stereoscopic photos cannot be seen passively. One has to make the physical choice to look at them; a person must first see the viewfinder, stop, lean in, and focus on the image within. At this point, the viewer’s entire range of vision is covered by the image. For the moments that one spends with a stereoscopic photograph, the rest of the world and the other images in it are put on hold.
There in Bahouth’s living room, he handed me a viewfinder with a picture of his mother, his siblings, and him in a living room fifty years ago. Suddenly there I was, in a different time and place, his family floating like a memory, his mother’s smile directed at me, their living room all around me. I put down the viewfinder. First, they had shown me space travel. Now, I had seen time travel.
Henry Finds Peace
A week later, Bahouth called me. He’d been up all night walking around the Goat Farm, trying to think of a way to wrap up Henry’s journey. He wanted to show that our worlds can expand, that his boy-wanderer could find a peaceful place. That’s when it hit him. He started gathering up cuttings from plants all over the property: flowers, weeds, honeysuckle, branches, leaves. “The Goat Farm expanded our universe,” he says. He had realized that Henry’s journey wasn’t so different from his own.
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