Shana Mabari is an American contemporary artist with a studio practice based in Los Angeles. Previously, she has also lived and worked in Paris, Northern India, Tel Aviv, and Ibiza, Spain. Central to Mabari’s process is her ongoing investigation of the intersections of art and science, as evidenced by her sculptures, installations, and immersive environments that explore the dynamics of visual perception and the ways in which we experience physical space.

The artist’s engagement with color, light, reflection, and geometric form are on a continuum that connects with the Light and Space movement that originated in California in the 1960s. Her vision of an expanded practice in the twenty-first century centers on exploring how the space of art making and viewing might productively intersect with what are otherwise often highly technical and advanced scientific fields, such as astrophysics and psychophysics.

 Mabari’s Spectrum Petals is currently the first section of the landmark exhibition Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020 as part of the region-wide Getty initiative PST Art: Art & Science Collide 2024. The work consists of seven mirrored, spectral-colored cylinder shaped sculptures, each 38–48 inches in diameter. In their geometric framing and precision fabrication, the forms of Spectrum Petals would seem almost inherently “scientific,” combined with the fact that their spectral colors correspond to the narrow band on the electromagnetic radiation spectrum that constitutes visible light, from 750 to 380 nm (red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and violet). Her engagement with Caltech began in 2002, when she started designing optical illusion environments for Dr. Shinsuke Shimojo, currently the Gertrude Baltimore Professor of Experimental Psychology. The pair was awarded a patent in 2004 for their Dynamic Spatial Illusions. Mabari has ongoing collaborations with experts in the vision sciences at Caltech and in the neurosciences at Zurich’s Institute of Neuroinformatics.

 Mabari began an extended engagement with the astronomical and aeronautical sciences in 2016, when her monumental sculpture Astral Challenger was put on permanent display by the city of Lancaster, California. While the twenty-foot-tall stainless-steel-and-acrylic landmark, conceived as both a tribute to the city’s achievements in the aerospace industry and to commemorate the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster, immediately evokes the iconic silhouette of a rocket, its minimalist form, illusion of near-weightlessness, and the changing play of light both by day and through nighttime illumination clearly reflect Mabari’s ongoing experimentation with the aesthetic concerns of the Light and Space movement.

 In 2018, Mabari was selected to be the first artist to fly aboard a mission of NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), which uses a 2.7-meter telescope mounted in a customized 747 flying to a maximum altitude of 45,000 feet to study such astronomical phenomena as black holes and star formation. This groundbreaking artist residency inspired a diverse body of work that included the Meteor series of lustrous gemlike acrylic sculptures and three series of prints on metallic paper, Planeta, Constellatio, and Stella. The experience also yielded the artist book Space, a collaborative project in which Mabari invited eleven individuals from an array of professional backgrounds to contribute short texts meditating on “space,” which the artist then published alongside her own original work.

Mabari’s own intersections with advanced scientific fields, from astrophysics to marine conservation, fuel her exploration of the complexities of the contemporary individual’s relationship to the ways in which such disciplines have dramatically expanded our collective field of vision and understanding of physical reality.