Night Studio
(Temporal Dislocations)
Ann Burke Daly + Marion Belanger
In Collaboration 2024—ongoing
Vernal Equinox
Prints and Interventions for Vernal Equinox, 2025, part of Night Studio (Temporal Dislocations). Digital pigment prints, the size of letters, on photographic rag paper; found negatives (Harvard Astronomical Plate Stacks); graphite + resin paint; Night Studio Journal (Weather Reports). We use found negatives and text interlaced with our own negatives and writing, in speculative narratives about time, climate change, weather, sleep states, historic women astronomers, subjectivity, and collaboration itself. The four seasonal equinoxes and solstices have a place in this project.
Night Studio
(Temporal Dislocations)
A yearlong project of 365 days. The month of January represented here. Each day of the month, files were found in the archive that correspond to the current day, but from the historic record beginning in the 1880s up to the mid to late twentieth century. Files were downloaded, altered, and printed. Each is marked with the historic date of all downloaded files. Some are multiple exposures. Digital pigment prints, the size of letters, on photographic rag paper; found negatives (Harvard Astronomical Plate Stacks); graphite + resin paint; Night Studio Journal (Weather Reports). We use found negatives and text interlaced with our own negatives and writing, in speculative narratives about time, climate change, weather, sleep states, historic women astronomers, subjectivity, and collaboration itself.
2025 Press Quote:
"And indeed, something has shifted here: the conceptual strength of the works in "Hill Blocks View" often feels more profound and more coherent than in years past, or maybe just punchier. That doesn’t mean it's always loud: works like Margaret Roleke’s 19th and Ann Burke Daly and Marion Belanger’s Night Studio (For Vera Rubin) are meaningful precisely because of their layered, rigorous but quiet approach to praxis and to history. In the second, the two artists have researched and gathered astronomical files—information about the night sky—and fused it with a deep, velvety pigment print of trees as they reach their bare branches to the heavens. On the print’s surface, numbers float through space, rough and stark enough that it looks like they have been drawn in white out. The result is something of a map, in which the viewer may try to locate themselves, or these woods, or something else entirely. The print is named in honor of Vera Rubin, an astronomer whose research on galaxy rotation helped support theories around the existence of dark matter. In a month that has seen photographs of women stripped from federal websites, it feels like a powerful reminder that it is on us, the viewers—not those in power, for whom profit may be the greatest goal—to educate and amplify each other.” —"Nasty Women Makes Its Return To New Haven,” by Lucy Gellman | March 12th, 2025
Slideshow Images Below:
Double Exposures. 36" x 45" on Hahnemühle rice paper.
Ann Burke Daly + Marion Belanger, 2025
Image 1: Night Studio (for Vera Rubin)
Image 2: Night Studio (for Annie Jump Cannon)
Image 3: Night Studio (for Williamina Fleming)
Night Studio
(Temporal Dislocations)
Ann Burke Daly + Marion Belanger
In Collaboration, 2024—ongoing
We are collaborating artists at work on Night Studio (Temporal Dislocations). Our process involves researching astronomical files of the night sky, and using these and found text that we interlace with our own photographic images and text, in speculative narratives about time, weather, sleep disturbances and dreams, historic women astronomers, subjectivity, and collaboration itself. We are Ann Burke Daly (Intermedia Artist) + Marion Belanger (Lens Based Artist), both MFAs from Yale (Daly, painting; Belanger, photography).
Part of the work is a co-journal called “Weather Reports” where we write daily, with a notational approach pertaining to the interests and ideas of Night Studio. We are also gathering documentation from the Harvard Astronomical Photographic Glass Plate Collection. On a given day we find astronomical plates made on that day in history. This practice began in earnest on January 1 with the intent to continue for the duration of the year 2025. A final piece will include 365 photographic prints, each one representing a day of the year. The prints will include those made from historic documents (going as far back as the 1880’s); images that we make; double exposures of historic plates, and a combination of our exposures with those from the archive. Some we will intervene with marks, words, painting, and reframing.
This year-long piece will be made of intimately scaled works on paper. We are also working to create large-scale images of the night sky some of which will be altered with over-painting and double exposures from found negatives. Together, we each bring different strengths to the mix, and embrace the greater sense of experimentation, inquisitiveness, and conceptual rigor held in play with the acceptance of accidents and role of chance in the working process and what we create collaboratively. We will also have some distinct series that will focus on specific aspects of the night sky such as the Pleiades Star Cluster and the Orion Nebula.
We are influenced by the life path of Vera Rubin, an astronomer seen as foremost in discovering evidence that verified the existence of dark matter, and in how she pursued her interests despite societal forces. We are equally motivated by the many Women Astronomical Computers who worked in the late 19th and early 20th century on the physics calculations, and visual records (the glass plates) of astronomical events documented through the Harvard and other telescopes. The proliferation of such numbers of women working in a crossover of stem and visual culture piques our interest. The history of these women and their role in early astronomy is remarkable. We find the smallness of the known universe astonishing. The vast darkness is where we aim ourselves in this moment which feels like an aporia for climate change, the environment, and all species.
We are also at work together on the pilot phase of The Mycelium Project. Through the Mycelium Project, we ask an expansive network of artists to foreground the gathering and transmission of their voices along with field recordings in sound and video, to activate a process of communal mourning for both personal and collective loss around environmental toxins and climate disruption in meditative works created at sites of personal significance. The project progressed to the Semi-Finals of the Creative Capital 2025 Awards Competition.
This page documents our work in progress. Our materials and approach are experimental. Contact us: annburkedaly (at) gmail (dot com); mbelanger36 (at) gmail (dot) com.
Irma Caldwell : Women Astronomical Computers at Harvard
Williamina Fleming: Women Astronomical Computers at Harvard
Williamina Fleming: Women Astronomical Computers at Harvard
Project Beginnings
Mycelium, Fungi, Compost and Cage
The Mycelium Project arose from conversations between us about the book “John Cage: A Mycological Foray, Variations on Mushrooms,” and our ongoing dialogues around our warming climate. Discussions of fungi as regenerators led to mycelium as a conceptual construct for collaboration. We began with the idea of behaving like and identifying with another life form, one that regenerates life from decay. Our dialog is with Conceptual Art projects and Filmmakers’ works including Cage’s Water Works; Yvonne Rainer's Trio A; Chantal Ackerman’s News From Home; Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet, and her series of “walking” artworks. Belanger has long portrayed the intersection of geology and the built environment; the warming planet has intensified her creative attention to climate crisis. Daly’s work deals with shifting subjectivity, temporal dislocations, proprioception, loss, and the unruliness of language, memory, and perception. Her recent work is a meditation on the shifting contours of self, through the prism of time; chronic illness; family history; environmental toxins; and domestic spaces.
Daly + Belanger
Collaborative Biography
We investigate issues of place, memory, and shifting subjectivities through sound, photography, video, and archive research.
Daly and Belanger have been in dialogue for decades. They have been part of a six woman collective that began after they earned their MFA’s in 1990, meeting in person or virtually for studio visits. In 2022 the collective participated in the NYPL pandemic diaries oral history project, and in 2018 they produced a limited edition portfolio, acquired by MoCP, Chicago; MASSart Rare Book Collection; and Yale University Art Gallery. They have explored archives in their creative work, and have each collaborated with other artists on interdisciplinary projects. Their focus on sound to mark places of loss grew organically through personal experiences. Daly has made voice recordings for sound-sculpture installations since the mid-1990s. For current work, she is sound-mapping her live-work spaces since becoming chronically ill. Belanger initially embraced sound to create an alternative to visual production for her young granddaughter who lost her vision soon after birth. With the Mycelium Project, they will work with a global network of artists using sound as a vehicle for embodied reflection and collective creative acts.
Image right is "A Mycological Foray," in Daly's studio. Images left and center sourced from internet