Peter Rostovsky, Sunrise Curtain, and Sunband, 2012, digitally printed glass / oil on canvas, Spring Creek Educational Campus, Brooklyn

Sunrise Curtain and Sunband by artist Peter Rostovsky, are two permanent indoor installations commissioned by the NYC School Construction Authority / Public Art for Public Schools program for Spring Creek in Brooklyn. Sunrise Curtain presents a large, pixilated sunrise installed in the glass curtain of the lobby. Using the image of the dawn to allude to illumination or enlightenment, the piece welcomes the viewer into the school, or alternatively, into the world as he or she leaves the building. While the image of the sun echoes the tradition of Romantic landscape painting, Sunrise Curtain specifically features a pixilated sunrise, whose digital character and production process speaks to future generations of technologically immersed students.
 
As a complement to Sunrise Curtain, the auditorium's Sun Band presents the viewer with twelve paintings of the sun arranged in the form of an archive. These paintings, painted with photographic color accuracy yet in a painterly manner, offer a tactile contrast to the mechanical look of the lobby. Presenting the sun in a series of its different aspects, this piece can be interpreted as a time-lapse, or even a calendar of different sunsets, sunrises, and apogees. Taken as a whole, the two works present related but distinct perspectives on nature and technology, as well as on photography and painting. The respective formal rhetoric of Sunrise Curtain and Sun Band thus point to nature and technology as inherently intertwined and whose evolving relationship it is the task of every new generation to rethink and to decipher.