Degrees of Paradise: The State of Heaven by Mel Chin

As questions around humanity’s responsibility towards the natural environment took on added urgency in the early 1990s, Storefront embarked on a series of ecologically-themed exhibitions. To accommodate Mel Chin’s installation The State of Heaven, two triangular spaces were created within the gallery space. In the west end of the gallery, a large hand-knotted carpet floated above the heads of the viewers; its condition represented global meteorological conditions according to data collected by satellites. Throughout the course of the exhibition, the rug was destroyed or repaired to parallel the condition of the ozone layer. In the eastern gallery, a canopy of suspended monitors played back images of meteorological dynamics generated in real time by a fractal program.