Client: University of Houston Clear Lake

Location: Houston, TX, United States

Completion date: 2005

Artwork budget: $120,000

Project Team

Artist

Paul Marioni

Industry Resource

Derix Glasstudios

Derix Glasstudios

Overview

Laminated glass. 10ft. X 50ft.
Commissioned by the University of Houston Clear Lake, Houston, Texas for a walkway between the Computer Sciences building and the Student Services building. CONSILIENCE, the unity of knowledge, combines art and science in this state-of-the-art narrative art work. Emphasizing mystery and magic, it is brought to life by the constant motion of light in the glass.

Goals

”What is this mystery we find so attractive? It is not a mere puzzle waiting to be solved. It is far more than that, something still too amorphous, too poorly understood to be broken down into puzzles. Our minds travel easily --- eagerly! --- from the familiar and tangible to the mystic realm. Today the entire planet has become home ground. Global information networks are its radiating trails. But the mystic realm has not vanished; it has just retreated, first from the foreground and then from the distant mountains. Now we look for it in the stars, in the unknowable future, in the still teasing possibility of the supernatural. Both the known and the unknown, the two worlds of our ancestors, nourish the human spirit. Their muses, science and the arts, whisper: Follow us, explore, find out”. - Edward Wilson