Eden Van Saun’s Keck Research Project “Cosmic Mirrors” on Display at USD

"Cosmic Mirrors" by Eden Van Saun, an art installation located outside of Saints Tekakwitha and Serra Hall, is part of her Keck Fellowship research project. Eden, an English and Spanish double-major and math minor, is a 2022-2023 Keck Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellow.

From Eden’s website, she describes her art project:

“As the culmination of a sustained, year-long research project as a Keck Fellow, this exhibit works in conjunction with the other aspects of my formal research project, “Decolonizing the Clock: Non-Western Time Concepts in Central American Art and Literature.” The two mirrored discs, facing one another, allow the viewer to situate themselves in an ‘in-between,’ experiencing other(ed) forms of time, mathematics, and space. In seeking to make visible other, non-Western spaces and temporalities, this piece makes accessible a new way of perceiving space and time. Inspired by pre-contact Mayan pyrite mirrors, this piece allows the viewer to ‘access’ a way of seeing that more closely approximates how the indigenous Maya viewed interdimensionality, simultaneity, and even time itself. The original handheld mirrors were seen by the Maya as ‘portals’ into other-worlds, dimensions, and realities. They displayed a high level of mathematical precision, approximating what Western Mathematics calls today ‘voronoi diagrams.’

This immersive piece therefore seeks to defamiliarize a familiar site– both the USD campus as well as the previous significance of the ‘leftover’ plinth– and offers the experience of a different form of perception, one easily available without a technical understanding of the greater research project. Indeed, one of my goals through my Keck Fellowship is to make my project more visible and accessible to a wider audience, moving beyond discipline and a purely academic setting to offer a lived practice of my research concepts. This piece in particular offers a mode of experiencing this difference, whether that may be by experiencing a brief change in visual perception or a lasting curiosity.

More than anything, this project was a community undertaking. Many minds, hands, and hearts made this exhibit possible.”

In addition, Eden is a member of the Honors Program, a Coordinator at the Writing Center, the Photography, Visual Art and Design Editor at the Alcalá Review, and a member of Sigma Tau Delta, the English Honor Society.

Upon graduation in May 2023, Eden will spend the summer traveling, visiting friends, and writing. After working for a year or two, she hopes to complete a PhD or MFA program.