While the Earth Revolves at Night belongs to a celebrated group of monumental triptychs that James Rosenquist painted in the 1980s. Unlike his collage paintings of the 1960s that overlaid a series of cropped images, his later works abut relatively unfragmented scenes to create incongruous adjacencies. In the left panel, a gloved female hand appears to have dropped a bag of groceries. This image of clumsiness or anger hangs alongside a panel depicting a woman's red lacquered fingernail that appears to jut beneath venetian blinds. The oversized nail is filed into the sharp nib of a fountain pen and surrounded by arcing star trails, like those captured in time-lapse photography of the night sky. In the right panel, a series of interlocking gears echoes this astral rotation. The work's phallic fingertip blocks off the stars beyond it, an apparent indication that the painting's central window offers no portal to cosmic truths.