Exhibition: Desperate Remedy/Little Ones (BHSU)

Show Description

In “Desperate Remedy/Little Ones,” artist Chris Combs, artist-in-residence at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), asks: What is it like to hunt something invisible, omnipresent, and vanishingly tiny, which leaves almost no trace of its existence? This exhibition of interactive and time-based sculptures, which are made with found objects, metal, wood, and industrial materials, considers the neutrino, a tiny, almost-massless particle found in staggering quantities all around us. Its central installation, “Little Ones,” places visitors into the perspective of the neutrino by allowing them to “collide” with hanging “atoms,” made with used copper gaskets from a detector at SURF and the artist's own custom circuit boards.

Included Works

Artist's Statement

What is it like to hunt something invisible, omnipresent, and vanishingly tiny, which leaves almost no trace of its existence? I have to imagine it involves a lot of conviction.

A neutrino, literally a “little neutral one,” is a strange, almost massless elementary particle. They are completely unaffected by electric or magnetic fields and are essentially sizeless—so tiny that they easily pass through comparatively-huge atoms. Trillions of neutrinos pass through your body every second.

We know little about them, in part because they are almost impossible to detect. They can pass through entire planets without stopping—indeed, a neutrino can pass through a light-year of lead. There is no straightforward way to see them within our normal lives. How would we ever know that they exist?

The secret is that neutrinos are very, very unlikely to collide with matter—but it isn’t completely impossible. Every so often, an unlucky neutrino has a coyote-meets-brick-wall moment and hits a tiny quark inside the nucleus of an atom. If this happens in the right context, there is a brief flash of light as it is annihilated.

Teams of researchers and engineers have gone to great extremes to build cavernous underground neutrino detectors. These pitch-black cavities are filled with ultra-powerful sensors, watching for single photons emitted by a neutrino’s final moment.

Where do neutrinos come from? That’s part of the intrigue. Exploding stars create them; so did the Big Bang. If you had magic neutrino-detecting glasses, looking anywhere in the sky, you’d see neutrinos created less than a second after the Big Bang, still hurtling around after all this time.

These longtime travelers turn out to be the real stars of the show, for neutrinos might explain one of the biggest mysteries of existence: What happened to all the antimatter?

Physics dictates that the Big Bang had an essentially equal amount of antimatter and matter. Each would just annihilate one other when encountered, creating endless destruction. Not the ideal environment for us to evolve!

Yet, somehow, matter won out, by a tiny fraction—making it possible for our sun, planet, oceans, and bodies to exist. Why?

It is thought that neutrinos and their Jekyll-and-Hyde opposite, the antineutrino, may hold the answer. One compelling theory is that these two opposites break down in slightly different ways when they slam into something, tipping the scales ever so slightly towards us existing. But it will take a lot more data to know for sure.

As an artist who focuses on the ways that we shape technologies—and how they shape us back—the hunt for the neutrino is a remarkable lens. If human understanding is a stone pyramid, there was one neutrino-shaped block missing at the bottom. After a massive investment of energy, materials, and time, we found it! But when lifted, the block turned into a wave, and then a message, and then a spiraling portal.

Neutrinos were theorized long before we could possibly detect any trace of them. When physicist Wolfgang Pauli first realized that nuclear beta decay seemed to violate the law of conservation of energy, he wrote to other physicists—addressing his “radioactive ladies and gentlemen”—proposing a new kind of particle to explain away the mis-matched math: a “desperate remedy.”

—Chris Combs

Exhibition Images

Follow for New Artwork

Instagram Mastodon Bluesky Facebook

Insiders Email

Be the first to know about my new artwork, shows, and events.

Drop me a note:

Your message:

Your e-mail address: