Sascha Behrendt and Ricky Lee are pleased to present My stars in the sky rustled softly: Works by Adrien Marçais and Thomas Ashcraft, an exhibition of paintings and photographs, which explore the intersection between science and art. The show, which features works expressing two different means yet similar observations on the universe and its mysteries, will be on view from Friday, October 19 to Sunday, October 21, from 10 am to 6 pm at Parasol Projects, located at 213 Bowery, on the Lower East Side. A private viewing will be held on Thursday, October 18, from 6 pm to 9 pm.

Adrien Marçais’s paintings are inspired by the latest scientific research juxtaposed with ancient spiritual beliefs on cosmology and the earth. His new body of work developed after a recent trip to Hopi and Navajo settlements as well as the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, a scientific and philosophical research center. It was here that he met Thomas Ashcraft, an encounter seemingly blessed by the sighting of a lucky rare horned lizard, and which later sparked the collaboration and idea for this exhibition. Marçais’s immersive and surreal paintings are rich with color, whether layers of glowing amber and pink, or intense deep blues swirling with mysterious objects that point towards alternative belief systems, and the possibility of parallel realities.

For the My stars in the sky rustled softly exhibition Ashcraft shares a selection of transient luminous events in the form of red sprites and jellyfish sprites. Sprites were first captured serendipitously on film in 1989 and were then proven in 1991 in images taken from the space shuttle. They are generated by super strong lightning strokes and appear strongest in the near infrared part of the optical spectrum and on high-speed video. They occur in the mesosphere, forty to eighty miles above the Earth. Mind-blowingly, jellyfish sprites can be more than five times larger than Mt. Everest in the sky. The reason they weren’t discovered until 1989 is that they happen just a little faster than the eye can perceive, about 1/10th of a second, though they have been glimpsed with the naked eye. They are huge, majestic and magnificent. Transient luminous events in the form of sprites are not yet fully understood by science and still hold many mysteries.