Those of us who spend our lives shuffling around on Earth are known for losing sight of the forest for the trees. (Sometimes we lose sight of whole forests.) But space travelers report that seeing our home planet from above sparks “the overview effect” — a feeling of awe that ushers in a cognitive shift, a heightened awareness that all humans are sharing a single sphere in the solar system.
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The term was coined by space philosopher (!) Frank White at a Space Studies Institute meeting in 1985. He followed that presentation with a mind-expanding book by the same name, filled with astronaut interviews about how their view of humanity changed once they saw the globe without the dotted lines denoting nations and states.
Orcas Island artist and entrepreneur Eric Morris is not an astronaut, but he gets it. Inspired by NASA’s Apollo mission photographs of the “whole earth,” he founded Orbis World Globes — the same year White introduced the overview effect — to create and share imagery of our planet without borders.
Morris started with beach ball-sized inflatable replicas, called Earthballs. Now celebrating 40 years, his air-filled Earthballs have kept expanding in size as digital imagery has improved.
The largest yet is Terra, a 24-foot-diameter globe suspended in the nave at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral. (Through Nov. 23; open 12-5 p.m. Friday and throughout services on Sunday, including a Peace and Thanksgiving string concert by the Styros Quartet.) Fabricated by Rainier Industries in Tukwila, the giant globe is so realistic and unexpected it appears almost Photoshopped into the room.
While I can’t personally compare it to the view from space, I can tell you Terra is a remarkable sight, lit from within and rotating on a tilted axis above the pews. Using NASA’s Blue Marble satellite imagery, the globe displays authentic weather systems swirling above continents and seas. The blue is quite starting — so much ocean! If you visit in between services, you can wander all around and beneath it, witnessing the world from all sides.
“The earth in its pure spherical form is a profound beacon of unity,” Morris said in a press release. Placing the globe above the pews in an enormous church offers a striking perspective shift no matter your religious beliefs — it seems as if parishioners have gathered to worship the earth itself.
Meanwhile in South Lake Union, another new traveling exhibit is showcasing how the world turns. Weci | Koninut is an interactive outdoor light-and-sound installation that highlights seasonal shifts as observed by First Nations cultures. Arranged in a cluster on the “Nitro Plaza” (at 7th Avenue and Blanchard Street), six handcrafted booths each contain a human-scale woven-rope dreamcatcher, a reclined wooden bench and pulsing lights and music activated by your presence.
The colorfully painted exhibit makes for highly Instagrammable moments — a specialty of Canadian production company Creos — but the story behind it has a deeper meaning.
The design was conceived by a collaboration of First Nations artists in the Quebec Province, led by creative directors Dave Jenniss (an Indigenous theatermaker and member of the Wolastoqiyik Wahsipekuk Nations) and Julie-Christina Picher (a painter and the first Atikamekw set designer in Quebec). The full team includes visual artist Eruoma Awashish (Atikamekw), sound designer Étienne Thibeault (Innu), and Picher’s mother, who was brought in to teach traditional modes of weaving.
The idea was to invite passersby on a “sensory journey through the forest (Notcimik),” while sharing a slice of First Nations art and lore. The Atikamekw Nation in Canada (and many other Indigenous cultures) mark six seasons, instead of four evenly divided into a 12-month calendar. Accordingly, Weci | Koninut encourages visitors to immerse themselves in the symbology, environmental shifts and animal legends of fall, pre-winter, winter, pre-spring, spring and summer.
We’re currently in pre-winter (Pitcipipon), when bears are preparing to hibernate, geese are flying south, and, on the night I visited, the wooden bench in the booth was too rain-soaked for me to lie down on. But leaning inside activates the light display and soundscape, offering a momentary and dreamy escape from the surrounding urban scenario. Weci | Koninut is at Nitro Plaza through Dec. 5, and moves a few blocks north to the unfortunately named “Path to Yes Plaza” (426 Terry Ave. N.) starting Dec. 6.
Related: For an indoor immersion in how local tribes have survived, struggled and thrived as sovereign nations in the Northwest, be sure to catch This Is Native Land, a new permanent exhibit at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. Featuring contributions from more than 60 regional tribes and 100 Indigenous collaborators — including work by influential Native artists such as Joe Feddersen, RYAN! Feddersen and Dan Friday — the multimedia exhibit traces how treaties and traditions have shaped the state.
More looks at books
In last week’s newsletter I promised to return with a few more book recommendations, specifically by the many local writers who are releasing titles this season. So here we go!
Novelist Peter Mountford (The Dismal Science) has a knack for writing believable characters who are messy, funny and bleak all at once. Such folks are on full (yet nonjudgmental) display in Detonator, his new collection of short stories, which Mary Gaitskill calls “hilarious, even when they are miserable.”
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s new novel Terry Dactyl uses a nonlinear timeline to trace the coming-of-age of a transgender lesbian, from 1980s Seattle to the NYC Club Kids scene and back. Taking place across the AIDS crisis and the COVID pandemic, the story employs Sycamore’s signature miles-long sentences to add to the novel’s raw and immersive charms.
And with more timeline twists, author Ryan Boudinot (Blueprints of the Afterlife) has released a dystopian novel about a successful but jerky 1980s novelist whose books were actually created by AI in the future. Broken Utopia is set in a triple-layer cosmos ruled by “a company that converts human experiences into drugs.” Let’s hope Boudinot isn’t clairvoyant.
The local writer perhaps doing the most this season is author Rebecca Brown, who can boast not one but two new books. Obscure Destinies is a compact collection containing a story, a memoir, a play and an essay — each conveying the intimate, mundane yet bewildering experience of the death of a loved one. The longtime Seattle writer’s humor is especially vivid in her play (originally written in 2009), which gallops from Beckettian to poignant. (Brown will read with Ryan Boudinot at Elliott Bay Bookstore, Dec. 2 at 7 p.m.)
Back in the 1990s, I took a fiction-writing course with Brown via the UW Extension program. I was (and remain) astonished by how she is able to convey such complex feelings through plainspoken language. Her quietly captivating style shines in the short chapters of her other new book, My Animal Kingdom, a collection of true stories about animal encounters.
Sometimes she’s raising a baby squirrel, sometimes she’s watching a heron stand impossibly still as a stab of personal worry ruffles her own feathers. There’s a fishtank reverie about the entrancing world of a home aquarium, and an urgent snapshot of trying to save an injured goose found on the road (“Sometimes I try to feel again how it lay its body against me”). Also: a surprisingly furious rant against rats!
As Brown puts it, “My Animal Kingdom is the breathing, soul-filled,
living kin with whom I share the home that is our world.” She’ll read from the book at a launch party at the Sorrento Hotel (Dec. 6 at 3 p.m.).
That’s all for now — I’ll be back with more arts news after the holiday. Wishing a rat-free Thanksgiving to those who celebrate!
Are you all caught up on Season 2 of Art by Northwest? Meet the printmakers, painters, sculptors, carvers and photographers who are making captivating work across the state. And in the process, glimpse the region's diverse geographical beauty.
