Frontiers of Fancy
By ELIZABETH COOK-ROMERO, IMAGES COURTESY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS
Before plopping down a $20,000 deposit to reserve a spot on one of Virgin Galactic’s ships, would-be space travelers can go to the company’s Web site and savor a detailed description of what they will see and feel. If they pay the remaining $180,000, blast off, float about weightless, and see the grand views of space, they will have spent more time reading about their visit to space than experiencing it.
Whether we’re anticipating spending six hours jammed into the middle seat during a transcontinental journey or making a minutes- long jaunt past the pull of Earth’s gravity, today we all have a pretty good idea what it feels like to be up there, and for Museum of Fine Arts curator Laura Addison, that lack of mystery is a terrible loss.
“I’ve been thinking about the naivete of inventors trying to accomplish something for the first time,” Addison said during a recent interview. Speculating about what it must have been like to dream about flight while having no concrete experience to draw on, she began planning a show about the human urge to fly. Her ideas shifted as she encountered artists whose work pushed her thinking in new directions.
As she talked about the inspiration for Flight of Fancy, a show that opens at the Museum of Fine Arts on Friday, May 18, Addison repeatedly mentioned Leonardo da Vinci’s plans for flying machines. He could only imagine what the world would look like from the sky. “What’s logical to us might not have been logical to da Vinci,” Addison said, adding that all of the exhibit’s works are tinged with absurdity.
The exhibition features works by Jamie Hamilton, William Lamson, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, and Sheilah Wilson. While Addison planned the show, Wilson approached her with a proposal for an indoor piece that would use balloons to represent the human desire for transcendence. Addison told the artist she was considering a flight exhibit, and she would like to have a performance for the opening. Wilson had unsuccessfully tried to fly with the aid of helium-filled balloons about a year and a half ago; Flight of Fancy gave her the excuse to revisit the idea with a few twists.
About 10 days before the opening, she was putting finishing touches on a boat, made of lightweight plywood and pine, which she hopes to “sail” in the courtyard of the museum with the help of helium and weather balloons. Wilson’s boat is named the Erg, after a ship that sank three times off the coast of her native Nova Scotia. The vessel is not strong enough to hold the artist; she’ll stay on the ground, but Wilson said she might lip-sync “Farewell to Nova Scotia” as the Erg rises for the fourth time. “Farewell to Nova Scotia,” about fishermen setting sail, is one of the first songs Wilson learned in school. The performance takes place during the opening reception. Addison said the launch would be filmed and posted on the museum’s Web site.
Hamilton’s steel-and-plastic constructions Vailix and Vimana were the first works to be installed in the museum’s second-floor gallery. Suspended from the ceiling, both seem to be from another era and designed to illustrate some obscure scientific theory. It’s easy to imagine a crusty old professor with a pointer using Vimna’s spirals and fins to explain the orbit of space junk or perhaps the trajectories of stardust.
Hamilton calls himself a pragmatist and says he is in love with elegantly functional machines such as late-19th-century steam engines and firetrucks. “We’ve lost knowledge,” Hamilton said. “Look at the Pantheon and old Roman bridges and aqueducts that are still standing and beautiful without maintenance. We’ve lost the skills to build things like that.”
Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison’s staged photogravures feature a character they call Everyman who’s portrayed by Robert ParkeHarrison, wearing a dark suit that doesn’t quite fit. He inhabits a world drastically altered by either weapons of mass destruction or human indifference to the environment. “He’s doing everything with such earnestness,” Addison said. Yet his actions seem senseless. In The Guardian, he balances on twisted stilts atop a tree stump; leafless branches jut from his back, suggesting skeletal wings. His arms are held away from his torso, giving some small sense that he might have some control over his useless wooden appendages. He appears ready to jump.
The Guardian, like most of the ParkeHarrisons’ work, has the feel of a faded print found in an old book, yet it looks eerily modern. The nostalgic toning in the photographs, Robert’s old-fashioned clothes, and the machines cobbled together from bits of wire and scrap wood seem to be from a past yet future world, suggesting that our problems are not new. Their strange images of Everyman lift a veil, allowing us to comprehend that our demons can be traced to the beginning of time — that, to survive, humanity has to learn to tame its worst instincts.
Posed with all the subtlety of a B movie, Lamson’s photographs evoke the moonwalks of the late 1960s and early 1970s, an era that feels far more contemporary than the future created by the ParkeHarrisons. In a goofy charade, Lamson and his friends dress in white jumpsuits and helmets that would provide little protection in space. A grassy field, photographed at night, serves as the lunar surface, and a white ball thrown into a dark sky does a surprisingly good job of suggesting Earth as seen from the moon.
Lamson’s photographs remind us that decades have passed since the world watched the space race between the United States and Russia. Real images of astronauts, cosmonauts, and monkeys strapped into cramped cockpits seem starkly primitive by the standards of our high- tech world. The builders of the first spaceships were in uncharted territory, and their creations looked as strange as some of Lamson’s photographs.
The first pioneers of flight who risked their necks in contraptions with canvas wings were different from the billionaires who have made reservations to fly into space on Virgin Galactic ships, Addison said. “There was an age of innovation driven by passion — not by wealth, power, and the desire to have what is not available to the average citizen.”
details:
+Flight of Fancy
Opening 5:30-7:30 p.m. Friday, May 18; exhibit through Sept. 9
+Launch of Sheilah Wilson’s Erg
6 p.m. Friday, May 18
+Museum of Fine Arts, 107 W. Palace Ave.
+$8, $6 state residents, no charge Friday 5-8 p.m., no charge Sundays for state residents; 476-5072
(c) 2007 The Santa Fe New Mexican. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.