PALE BLUE DOT

SINGLE-channel Video

In Pale Blue Dot, Dorota Mytych paints not on canvas but on the surface of water. The resulting video, rendered in black and white, evokes cosmic imagery—whorls of paint drift and dissolve like nebulae or collapsing stars, their forms at once microscopic and vast. The fluid choreography mesmerises, drawing the viewer into a space that feels at once terrestrial and celestial.

This meditative, ephemeral performance becomes a visual counterpart to Carl Sagan’s reflection on the fragility and unity of life on Earth. His famous words—“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us”—spoken in response to the Voyager 1’s photograph of Earth as a “pale blue dot” seen from 6.4 billion kilometres away, are re-contextualised by Mytych through a gesture of delicate creation and dissolution. The artist’s hand never intrudes; instead, she orchestrates a process that allows form to emerge, transform, and fade.

A keen viewer may detect subtle echoes of art history in the fleeting figures that appear, but these references remain suspended and unresolved. In this way, Mytych’s work is both a meditation and a quiet call to humility. It does not depict the Earth, but it gives form to Sagan’s plea: to see our home with reverence, and to remember how small and interconnected we truly are.