Antique Skies

Artist Johan Österholm’s Antique Skies process begins with the unsheathing of an X-Acto knife. To the horror of librarians everywhere, he carefully slits out blank or nearly blank sheets of yellowing paper (endpapers, for example) from nineteenth-century astronomy tomes, which he unearths in antiquarian bookshops across Europe and later carefully dissects in his Stockholm studio. What might initially seem like an act of vandalism is not without its conservational claim. For more than a century, these mostly wordless, imageless pieces of paper have been, if not wasted per se, then not exactly used between the covers of their respective titles. Via a process that incorporates the spangled contents of celestial glass-plate negatives, a spray gun loaded with liquid silver gelatin, and a repurposed street lamp, Österholm has a grand use for them: to serve as canvases for the re-emergence of stars long shrouded by terrestrial light pollution.