The lights in this photograph are stage lights that Dario Robleto appropriated from the covers of albums by musicians who have died, including Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley, and Patsy Cline. These images refer to the death of the vinyl album and the artist’s personal memories, but they also preserve an exciting period of history. The lights’ appearance in Robleto’s work is also inspired by the Hubble Space Telescope’s “Deep Field” images. As the artist has explained, “The visuals they create are meant to parallel NASA astronomical photography of the ’70s and ’80s. I remember as a young fan eagerly searching for missing live albums of my favorite musicians, as much as I eagerly waited to hear news from each probe NASA sent out and to see what it had photographed. I was as captivated by the peripheral images of light and stage set-up on the album covers as I was by what might lie beneath the haziness of the planetary and stellar images coming from NASA. These early memories became intertwined in such a way that I have always understood the musical stage and outer space as similar cycles of evolution: birth, youth, death, re-birth.”

Label from Looking Out and Looking In: A Selection of Contemporary Photography, January 19–June 9, 2013