Psyche Inspired: Levi Keatts

Institution: Virginia Commonwealth University

Major: Art Foundation (intended Painting/Mathematics double major)

Psyche Inspired Class: 2019-2020

Reflections from Levi

Psyche has a metal soul

Depiction of a woman dressed in ancient Greek attire holding a lamp. She is super-imposed over a depiction of the Psyche asteroid.

Psyche has a metal soul

Levi Keatts

October 28, 2019

Major: Art Foundation (intended Painting/Mathematics double major)

Genre/Medium: oil paint on aluminum composite panel

About the work: (16) Psyche is a metal asteroid that we believe may consist largely of nickel and iron. The team working on the Psyche mission hypothesizes that the asteroid may be the exposed core of an early protoplanet. When I was challenged to make artwork based on this mission, I immediately began to make connections between this information and the classical mythology and symbolism of Psyche, the goddess. Read more…

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Impacting The Future

This is a small, reflective, blue tinted painting. In the lower right-hand quadrant of the piece, a smaller orange meteorite hits the dark silhouette of 16-Psyche. Leading lines of white, gold, red, and orange radiate outward from the impact. Rocks are scattered along the lines and appear to be closer to the viewer. In the background, there are many multicolored stars.

Impacting The Future

Levi Keatts

December 18, 2019

Major: Art Foundation (intended Painting/Mathematics double major)

Genre/Medium: acrylic paint, plexiglass, glass

About the work: One of the primary objectives of NASA’s Psyche mission is to determine if 16-Psyche is an exposed core of an early protoplanet, or if it is comprised of unmelted materials. I was inspired to create a piece around this question. This is my artistic imagining of an early collision removing chondritic crust from the protoplanet and exposing Psyche’s melted nickel-iron core. This painting was done using acrylic paint on the front and backs of plexiglass sheets (topped with a glass sheet). The final image is made from seven total sheets. My hope was that the physical thickness of the transparent materials I painted on would add a sense of additional depth to the work.

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Somewhere Between Jupiter and Mars

There are three canvases of increasing size top to bottom. The lowest shows a woman wrapped in a blanket and stargazing. She is surrounded by decorative jasper beads adhered to the canvas. The second panel is oblong and shows a waxing gibbous moon, as well as some clouds. The third panel shows the asteroid (16) Psyche between the planets Jupiter and Mars. All three panels are done primarily in shades of yellow with occasional accents of red.

Somewhere Between Jupiter and Mars

Levi Keatts

March 3, 2020

Major: Art Foundation (intended Painting/Mathematics double major)

Genre/Medium: oil on canvas and jasper beads

About the work: This piece is a homage to the advancement of art and exploration. Debatably, one of the earliest known pieces of art was the Makapansgat pebble. This is a small red jasperite rock that looks like it has a face on it, which was caused by natural withering. Some early human found this pebble and decided to carry it back to their cave roughly 20 miles away. This makes me think about how far we have come as humans–from being enamored with a pebble to sending an unmanned spacecraft to an asteroid far away from Earth and making art about it. (Because Psyche and Earth orbit at different speeds, the distance from Earth to Psyche varies over a large range, from < 2 astronomical units, or AU, to > 4 AU!) I hoped to display this with a three-panel painting. The first panel shows a human surrounded by jasper beads, representing the Makapansgat pebble. The second panel depicts the moon, representing one of the most noteworthy feats of human exploration. And finally, the last panel depicts the asteroid (16) Psyche, representing our current field of exploration.

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Light Curves

Light Curves

Levi Keatts

May 29, 2020

Major: Art Foundation (intended Painting/Mathematics double major)

Genre/Medium: wire and yarn

About the work: My fourth project for Psyche Inspired is a yarn sculpture of the asteroid (16) Psyche. It was inspired by a paper called “Radar Observations and Shape Model of Asteroid (16) Psyche.” In this paper, scientist spoke about how they used the “inversion of light-curves” to develop a topographical map of (16) Psyche. The sculpture is meant to be an artistic interpretation of this.

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