Ulrik Heltoft
Dust of Suns
The nose — On the inside it’s a silver negative of the artists nose, capturing its precise texture and conture. The outside — the high polished mirrored warped surface is the vanishing point made physical. space compressed into a tiny gleaming point.
The pre-telescopic astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) became facinated teenager by astronomy after witnessing a solar eclipse. He dedicated his life to making the most precise astronomical measurements the world had ever seen, all with the naked eye. His family sent him to study in Copenhagen and then in Leipzig to study law, but he soon became entirely occupied with astronomy. In 1565 and 1566, Tycho studied mathematics at the universities in Wittenburg and Rostock. In Rostock, Tycho engaged in a nighttime duel about a mathematical problem and perhaps a shared love interest, which ended up costing him part of his nose when struck by his fellow student and cousin’s sword in the dark. He wore a metal prosthetic for the rest of his life.
Tycho Brahe's reputation as an accomplished astronomer rose quickly, primarily through his observations of and writings on the novae in Cassiopea 1572 and of the 1577 comet. De Nova Stella (The New Star) — the sudden appearance of a star where none was seen before — was published in 1573 and proved that the cosmos is not fixed and eternal as Aristotle had promised.
The book — a two-thousand page star catalog, lists the stars in view from 55 Cancri / Copernicus system, along with their coordinates and qualities. The gaze is reversed, and the Sun is dissolved into the visible 123,663 points of light, as seen from Cancri 55e.
The books content of cordinates, qualities and magnitude, holds a potential image of the sky. There is a latent image inside the 2000 pages of numbers. An instruction for an image of the sky of 55 Cancri e.
Raymond Roussel wrote New Impressions of Africa (Nouvelles Impression d’Afrique) between 1915 and 1932. A line in his poem initiated this project — ‘A section of starry sky viewed from sidereal space to create an impression of infinity’ (Un pan de ciel étoilé sans paysage terrestre semblant vu d'un point de l'espace sidéral donnant l'impression de l'infini ).
It is the caption for the last illustration in the book, that shows a block of black sky perforated with stars in various degrees of perspective and pairs with lines from the poem itself: The astronomer / Gets used to the depths of the vast heavenly void / Where light runs without ever exceeding its limits.
The image caption acted as Roussel’s instruction to the illustrator of the book. Roussel hired a private detective firm to deliver his instructions to Zo. Zo did not know who had hired him, nor did he know what he was illustrating — only the short descriptions Roussel wrote for each of the 59 drawings.
On view through April 24, 2026
Micki Meng Chinatown
Photography by Robert Dviers Herrick
