Please join us for a special reception celebrating the opening of Against Outer Space.
More about the exhibition
The outsideness of outer space never made sense to us. Earthly life unfolds both within and against a porous boundary with unearthly space. The planet has always been—and will always be known to be—in a dynamic relationship with extraterrestrial energies and materials. All societies feature stars, suns, meteors, and celestial events within their origin stories and descendance lineages. Contemporary scientific stories assert, for instance, that solar energy is the catalyst for all life processes and that Earth’s water may have come from ancient cometary collisions. And in these myriad stories, life on Earth is made possible by essential barriers between here and what lies beyond.
Against Outer Space brings together a group of artworks that materialize this inside-outside paradox without attempting resolution. They do so by working with and beyond dominant technoscientific ideologies about outer space. In those ideologies, governments, militaries, and industries can tend to represent space as apart, unruly, hostile, inaccessible, and exclusive in order to justify bids to occupy and control it. In such perceptions, outer space appears to be an empty finders-keepers frontier.
Artworks in the exhibition contend with those aesthetics and invite other older and newer visions. They do not treat space as out of reach, but as a place full of places that are continuously connected to everyday lifeworlds. Outer space, in this open invitation, is not separate. Space objects are lively entities. Earthly beings share photonic and chemical kinship with these entities. Images of space and the night sky invoke an intimacy with immensity. Space bridges ancestry and futurity in a vibrant way. Its close outsideness allows new questions, new recognitions, new ways of being.
Against Outer Space is supported by The Beall Family Foundation and the Claire Trevor School of the Arts.
