ARK delves into human reckoning with the immense scale and timescales of the universe and the influence that has on the deeply small and personal. In A View, 10 000 Years Apart and The Black And Stupifying Sea, Rat has presented two triptychs exploding with layered imagery. A View looks at the scope of our sight, exponentially expanded by our gigantic glittering eyes looking out from space. They have crowded the canvas with orbital paths of notable missions, each seeing further than before. The sky is fractured and turned on its axis, in some parts mirrored. The two sides of the mirrored view are 10 000 years apart, where some things change and some things stay the same, like the clouds, the blue, the eroding horizon and us.

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The Black And Stupifying Sea is marred by eruptions and the blast of a leaving entity, clad on either side by a figure retrieving his pornography from the pile of straw he hides it within. These figures are like Sibyls, prophetesses, holding and imparting knowledge. Their heads are replaced with diagrams, one a schematic describing the likelihood of life in the universe, the other of a nuclear warhead achieving fusion. The centre is inhabited by house like objects, which reference the seemingly ultimate form of human existence, drifting aimlessly in generation ships, destructively jettisoning off the Earth, now itself exhausted as a vessel.

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The space is visited by celestial bodies, two velvet space rocks. They have taken on a personified form, messengers from unknown distances and times, who pass us by. Some join us, Messengers#2 referencing the Murchison meteorite which hit Australia in 1969 and offered tantalising hints at its potentially life generating force. The Fabric Of The Universe paintings imagine the future of the ships and asteroids alike, travelling forever, though the houses join them in ultimately being nothing more than a lost space rock.

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