From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being...will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
Roland Barthes
We are spatial beings; bodies in space. Our imaginings of space are informed by our spatial experiences here on earth. Our bodies have been intimate with earth; we understand it in profound ways. How will the human experience of outer space evolve as we venture further into new space, different space...a space we can only imagine?
Jane + Louise Wilson dwell on a secret ‘space space’; the abandoned power structures and apparatus of an early space training ground, Star City, USSR. Kristina Estell attempts to bridge a distance and place that is beyond human comprehension and suggests an intuitive way to comprehend the most remote of our human-made assemblages, Voyager One. David Bowen sets up robotic bodies programmed to track aging parts from other junked machine bodies. In Sunlight, Elizabeth Price suggests an ongoing history of power emanating from our singular, solar body and its affect on the female body in space.
All the works monitor bodies in space. They monitor the passing of time and the recording of great distances. Recalling places, objects and times that are gone or tied to us now by the most tenuous of threads...absent, abandoned or existing only in memory. The works suggest a repetition of recorded histories and traditional power structures. They remind us that once there was a race for space.