Cosmos is a series of collage prints made with emulsion-coated dry glass plate photography. Onda describes "it was the standard of choice used by large astronomical observatories and surveys for documenting and imaging the sky. It's said more than 2.4 million glass plates were made in North America alone." These observations with optical telescopes traced 23 million light-years of intergalactic space – an enormous electromagnetic field. Lights as a transmission medium." Although there is a history of astronomically-oriented painting, such as the stunning paintings of Vija Celmins, Onda's work here focuses on a new kind of his "cassette memory," with traces of stellar light recorded and remembered on dry glass plates. That the form was abandoned in the 1970s amplifies the magic of the "recently outmoded" that Walter Benjamin discussed in relation to the Paris arcades and other abandoned forms of textual and image-based archive – a magic that opens up as the commodity form leaves the object – or in this case, the scientific value, leaving a vast archive of recordings of stellar light, historical but forgotten, stunningly complex and beautiful and real. (Marcus Boon)


Past Exhibitions

2025  The Substation, Melbourne, Australia