Lita Albuquerque’s Cosmic Levitations

The moon slips out from behind a craggy peak, leaking light over the serrated ridgeline. The midnight sky’s velvet firmament cloaks the boundlessness of space. Lita Albuquerque’s luminous monoprints, created in collaboration with Farrington Press, a studio and observatory nestled in the mountainous wilderness between the high desert and alpine forest, channel the ethereal atmosphere of the ecotonal landscape in which they were made. Dusted with gold leaf and powdered pigment and formed from a constellation of direct and residual marks, the prints feature incandescent, monolithic shapes that hover over rich, obsidian grounds, a nod to the canyon’s nocturnal hues. Anchoring the works, these central abstract forms—golden voids evoking a pebble, a mountain, or the moon—read as microscopic and telescopic at once, reflecting Albuquerque’s enduring interest in mineral and cosmic scales. 

The prints’ material qualities echo their geological surroundings and celestial bearings. For example, the compositions’ biomorphic shapes trace the contours of stones found in the landscape. Diffuse clouds of pigment suggest distant nebulae. Beyond these formal correspondences, Albuquerque’s incorporation of gold leaf carries specific symbolic weight. Its use not only harks back to the mining history of this area of Southern California, where prospectors first identified valuable gold deposits in remote, arid canyons in the mid-19th century, but also references ancient cosmic processes that predate the formation of the Earth itself. Billions of years ago, extreme astronomical phenomena such as neutron star mergers and magnetar flares generated the intense conditions needed to birth gold, which dispersed through deep space and eventually commingled with the gas clouds that formed our solar system. While the Earth’s nascent molten core absorbed and retained most of the element, later asteroid impacts injected fresh gold into the crust and mantle, where hydrothermal fluids ferried it upward through a network of veins and fissures. Erosion eventually exposed the gold. Here, delicate handwork translates it to paper. In Albuquerque’s prints, then, the presence of gold leaf functions as a metaphysical sign of intimate and infinite proportions, indexing both the hands of the artist and printer—their relationship an alchemical collaboration—and the enigmatic material history of the known universe itself. 

-Jessica Simmons-Reid