The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Titled after a sci-fi novel by Robert Heinlein, ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ is a series of floating mysterious pastel LED light forms, glowing “blob-drawings” that explore the tension between nature and technology, mystery and resolution, closure and longing….The collection traces the forms that multimedia artist-designer Molly Valentine Dierks photographed in travels across China, Japan, and South Korea, combined with images from Ukiyo-e prints, Disney cartoons, and manga. By freezing images of ambiguous entities in motion, the light-drawings references gestures of growth, motion, and transformation—blending natural vitality with technological energy.

Each form was carefully selected, traced, and altered in order to contain a kind of stilled wildness…reminiscent of things dripping, exploding, unfurling, or flying. Exploring the idea of the moon’s ‘retro-reflection’ (reflecting ourselves back to us), the light-artworks revel in the strange, the unnamable, and the uncanny… forms that suggest that which is familiar while remaining elusive to the conscious mind.

Alluring, but somehow just beyond reach, the series is inspired by the artists’ feelings around the collision between the organic and the technological worlds—each defined by seductive, delicate, and robust networks. The linework hints at disembodied landscapes, evocative of the alienation inherent in a push and pull between the natural and artificial.

In Heinlein’s 1966 science fiction novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the Loonies—those exiled to live on the moon–are social pariahs, feared because of their inability to conform to category. As a kind of visual antidote to this social anxiety of the novel (which continues today), the works in ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ instead explicitly revel in the sensuality of the dynamic and mysterious, the strange or mutable… that which is electrically evolving.