Mount Wilson Observatory is proud to present TERRA COSMICA,
a mesmerizing, looping, 43-minute immersive film by Rebeca Méndez and Stephen Nowlin with music/sound by Drew Schnurr. Projected onto a 300-inch circular screen inside the historic 100-inch Telescope dome, the work extends Méndez’s global walking project, weaving sound and imagery to dissolve the divide between earth and cosmos and inviting viewers to experience landscapes as both grounded place and infinite space.
On view Saturdays through October 26 2025 | 3-5PM
Exhibition Admission: $5 at the door
PLEASE NOTE: Access to the dome exhibition level is via a 53-step staircase. Mount Wilson Observatory is a mile high in elevation so the air is noticeably thinner. There is no ADA-compliant access.
In Iceland, 2013, artist Rebeca Méndez began her lifelong video project Walking the Earth, as a meditation on how ‘space’ becomes ‘place’ when imbued with our presence. Her global project embodies a sense of land and sky as an aesthetic/spiritual duality that connects the earth and its living things to the larger cosmos beyond. Of it she has said, “Every step is a heartbeat – a step of life. I want viewers to imagine that they are experiencing these landscapes.” In 2024, the project dovetailed with a public art commission by Oregon’s Portland International Airport for fifty-four videoed walks through the state’s landscapes — across which the artist followed a center line of horizons, earth, and sky.
Furthering the poetical themes of her walks, Méndez teamed with Mount Wilson Observatory artist-in-residence Stephen Nowlin in creating Terra Cosmica, a union of visual and sound imagery woven to her lyrical acts of walking mother-earth – the planet that cradled all living things. Projected onto the 300-inch screen inside the dome of the Observatory’s history-making 100-inch telescope, the video is an immersive experience of art, science, and the sublime of nature’s infinity.
Symbolically, Terra Cosmica questions a stereotype about earth and space – which is that the earth somehow exists apart from, or is an exception to, the alien cosmos we see via telescopes and dark skies. In this ancient view, we are onlookers observing the stars from seats in the audience, as insular stay-at home voyeurs. As one of history’s stubborn binary memes, earth thus continues even today as the psychological headquarters of the universe — and everything else becomes the other, leftover space that seems hardly relevant to our social rhythms and daily existence. Yet since at least the 17 th century, and more so over the past 100 years, and exponentially so the last 20, we’ve continued to pierce earth’s atmospheric bubble and probe for a better understanding of ourselves by looking far, far beyond. Like infants peering past the nursery, glimpsing for the first time what had already always been, the realization dawns that there’s no difference between us, here and not us, out there. The heavens we once used as storage for gods and other fictions have now revealed their truths as our own sense-of-place for living, thinking, creating, and identity – no longer an up-there and a down-here. Walking the earth, it’s time to realize, is also walking across cosmic terrain — where ‘space’ becomes ‘place.’
Stephen Nowlin
More information about Rebeca Méndez: rebecamendez.com
More information about Stephen Nowlin: stephennowlin.com
Directions to Mount Wilson Observatory
Be aware you will need a U.S. Forest Service Adventure Pass to park at the Observatory, as it is located on U.S. Forest Service land.