EMILIE HALPERN: MOON
APRIL 17 – MAY 21, 2010
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
With this show I really wanted to take advantage of the fact that I wasn’t limited by any laws of reality. If given the option to be able to do anything with my art, I choose outer space. At first, I really loved the idea of being able to exhibit art in a gravity free environment. I always find myself wishing that my sculptures could just float in the air, as if filled with helium, or sitting on a hover board instead of a pedestal. I think that’s why most of my sculptures end up hanging down from the ceiling, or as defeated little piles on the floor.
It was important that this exhibition be fantastical but also believable. There had to be an element of the possible. I wanted magic but not science fiction. It had to be the Moon, the only place man has set foot outside of Earth. But also the Moon because it’s the embodiment of the romantic- present but always out of reach, always changing.
Since the first lunar landing in 1969, man has been dumping debris on the surface of the Moon. Apollo 11 alone left behind over 100 items, garbage that will soon be protected as a historical resource as Tranquility Base is named a United Nations World Heritage Site. This idea of trash or debris becoming treasure once it’s made it to the surface of the Moon, is what inspired the Last Love Letter Memorial.
Conspiracy and fakery has for a long time enshrouded the images and footage by the Apollo landings. Our ability to travel to the moon, to walk its surface is so unfathomable, that for some the images no longer become truth but trickery. Our relationship to these images and our ability to believe is what inspired this exhibition, and the way each photograph was made with flat footed low tech illusions.
“Moon” is a black and white photograph of broken egg shells.
“Lunar Meteorite” is a color photograph of a lunar meteorite placed inside the image of an eye.
“Last Love Letter Memorial” is a marble sculpture in the shape of crumbled piece of paper installed on the far side of the Moon. Replaced by more instantaneous forms of telecommunication, the handwritten love letter on paper is slowly becoming extinct. This is a monument to the end of romantic postal communication, the end of delay and distance, the end of over-idealizing the loved one with a thousand perfections when separated by time and space.
“Permanent Darkness” is a sound recording of a tortoise mating call installed in the Erlanger Crater on the Moon. Due to its position near the north pole of the moon, sunlight never reaches the bottom of the crater.
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