Ellen Driscoll's Passages

Art in America, June, 2000 by Janet Koplos

New photo-based murals in Grand Central Terminal tunnels give passengers on the run a different sense of time and place.

New tunnels at New York's Grand Central Terminal allow commuters arriving on the Metro North Railroad to exit from the north ends of the platforms, rather than having to go south and enter the terminal to reach street level and turn north to the midtown office district. Reclaimed from old postal service tunnels, these wide but rather low-ceilinged ramps (variously 7, 8 and 9 feet high) have been refaced with metal ceilings, terrazzo tile walls and poured terrazzo floors by the New York architectural firm of Beyer Blinder Belle. The new look is clean, crisp, well-lighted and impersonal, suiting the goal of funneling passengers efficiently toward their destinations.

That environment would hardly be noticeable were it not for some texture, some details, some human qualities that catch the eye and snag the imagination. These bits of particularity are 13 glass-mosaic murals designed by Ellen Driscoll and titled As Above, So Below. The title plays off the idea common to many religions that what happens where the gods reside influences what happens on Earth. And it refers literally to Driscoll's source of inspiration: the dazzling mural of the night sky on the recently refurbished ceiling of Grand Central Terminal, conceived by Whitney Warren with Paul Helleu and executed by J. Monroe Hewlett and Charles Basing between 1903 and 1913.

Driscoll's mosaics illustrate cosmological theories--explanations of the movement and configurations of sun, moon and stars--drawn from Aboriginal, African, Native American, Mayan, Greek, Chinese and Hindu cultures, among others. The mosaics, which are made of tesserae ranging from a quarter-inch to an inch in size, are accompanied by small groups of 9-by-12-inch glass tiles that reiterate decorative aspects of the mosaic themes of time and motion. In a layered conceptual program that seems apt for layered underground sites adjoining upper and lower levels of railroad tracks, Driscoll has rendered these myths of diurnal and seasonal change in black-and-white photographic imagery digitized and made to correspond to the pointillist effects of mosaics. The photographs are her own. She found appropriate people in New York or Boston (she divides her time between the two cities) to pose for each illustration of myth except the Aboriginal story, which is rendered in mosaic without photographic intermediation.

Driscoll's use of photography is not accidental or merely convenient, but part of her program of ideas. In using it, she acknowledges the widespread belief that the 19th-century experience of seeing the landscape seemingly in motion from a railroad car was crucial to the development of motion pictures. The central images in the mosaics involve some representation of movement--a bird in flight, hands reaching, a wheel or globe turning--which she has rendered in the style of Etienne-Jules Marey's early continuous-motion photographic exposures. Some of the glass-block accompaniments are tributes to the sequential stopped-motion photographs of Eadweard Muybridge.

All the mosaics also include celestial diagrams from the various cultures, or patterns symbolic of ordering principles or forces, and many feature the image of a toy train moving on a circular track. A circular bronze plaque at each site includes a map of the world that marks the geographic origin of the depicted story, and a brief text naming the culture and principles represented.

As a whole, the project sounds, and is, quite complex. But the works themselves have immediate appeal. In the simplest senses, they are all pictures of something happening, within borders that can be appreciated for their colors, glossy surfaces and decorative patterns. In this way, they are effective as instant images--like advertising, movies and snapshots, which are so ubiquitous in contemporary culture that they seem comfortable, not challenging. Commuters might only half see the mosaics in their rush, yet still register something. The complexity and degree of detail that are inherent in mosaics would suggest to passersby that there is more to these works than can be grasped in flight. And the person who stops for a minute immediately gets more.

One of the most beautiful effects of the materials is the depth of light and color, and a sense of space within glass tiles of any size. Even the smallest tesserae (fitted together by the Franz Mayer company in Munich) catch light and differentially bounce it off or cast shadows with their irregular thicknesses. The larger glass blocks are so thick that they give one the sensation of looking through water at the designs painted on or incised into the underside. These blocks (custom-made by Blenko in West Virginia) are also used to frame a few of the mosaics. They make up, for example, a Greek key and grapevine arch around a mosaic image of Persephone eating a pomegranate. Imagery on these large tiles was executed by Brooklyn artist Julie Nathanson, working with Driscoll.