I first saw Alicja Kwade’s Pars Pro Toto sculpture installation at the Stanford campus in early 2022, when Covid was still raging and the quarantine enforced. There were hardly any people around, and coming across this spacious outdoor display of twelve planet-like spheres stopped me in my tracks. It was visually exciting, as well as thought-provoking: a whimsical reminder of a children’s marbles game, outer space galaxies, and interplanatery movement.
I have returned to the Science and Engineering Quad many times since, most often with my camera and have continued to marvel at and explore the fluid connections between the colorful spheres within the architectural design. I was captivated by the many ways in which individual, as well as group “portraits” of the spheres were affected and often stransformed by the variation of light, space and point of view. Not surprisingly, my camera has been most useful, like a kaleidoscope of sorts, in capturing and revealing the sibling-like character of the spheres, and the ephemeral nature of this enchanting assemblage.