Digital print on outdoor-grade nylon, ratchet straps
15 x 22 feet (4.6 x 6.7 meters)
2020
Buffalo Skyway, Buffalo, New York

Sympathetic Associations is a large-scale digital print on fabric, which traces the history of American photographer Berenice Abbott’s series Documenting Science, originally executed by Abbott for Scientific Illustrated and the Physical Science Study Committee. In Documenting Science, Abbott’s patented technology captured striking photographic exposures of light waves moving through tanks of water. Originally intended for educational textbooks, these images echo processes of interference, evasion, and secrecy that were present during the anti-Communist and anti-scientific fervor of the McCarthy era. At the time, both Abbott and the Photo League—a cooperative organization she belonged to which was devoted to documentary photography—were under investigation by the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee for communist affiliation and subversive activity.

Abbott considered this series depicting scientific phenomena to be one of the most important yet unacknowledged in her career. The result is an abstract interplay of light, repetition, and rhythm suspended in the underpass of a highway.

This work was commissioned for Play/ground 2020, a public art exhibition organized by Resource:Art and the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. It is suspended under the Skyway highway project, adjacent to Buffalo's Explore & More Children's Museum in the Canalside neighborhood of Buffalo, New York.