With an imposing stance, the astronaut Gordon Cooper towers over visitors to the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. Everything about him glows: his metallic spacesuit, the soles of his shoes, the helmet he clutches in the crook of his arm. His head is an otherworldly blue, his hair and eyes blaze white.
Mr. Cooper was one of the seven astronauts who participated in Project Mercury, America’s first manned space program. His giant image, at the entrance to the museum’s atrium gallery, is a site-specific mural created by Mungo Thomson, who manipulated the colors in a photograph from NASA’s public archives. Part of the Los Angeles-based artist’s continuing series “Negative Space,” the mural covers a 23-foot-high wall where, near the ceiling, a small circular window suggests a celestial orb in the distance.
Mr. Cooper is an apt ambassador for “Touch the Sky,” an exhibition of 51 works by 19 artists, each responding to the awe-inspiring mysteries of the universe. The show presents an array of approaches, on a spectrum from factual to imaginary, in media including paint, pencil, printmaking, video, assorted photographic techniques and a bit of powdered cocaine.
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In an effort to depict the magnitude of the universe, the Belgian artist Mishka Henner made “Astronomical,” a scale model of the solar system in the form of a 12-volume, 6,000-page artist book. With the sun on Page 1 and Pluto on Page 6,000, and the width of each page equivalent to a million kilometers in space, the work, completed in 2011, contains page after page of blackness. “When you finally come to a planet, it’s just a speck. In this context, it’s almost possible to get your head around it,” Ms. Lombino said, emphasizing the word “almost.”
