| On Exhibition | August 1 – September 14, 2015
| Residency Exhibition | September 5 – 14, 2015
Voyager One
Kristina Estell and David Bowen
Cloud Stories Jana Harper
SEED SPACE ART + TECH LAB
There is a Light That Never Goes Out
Voyager One
Caine O’Rear
Kristina Estell and David Bowen It was 1977. We needed a dream to rise up and stoke “our capacity for wonder,” as Fitzgerald would say. Elvis was dead, New York City was dark, and there were Saturday night fevers that just wouldn’t break. So we fired you up, cut the apron strings and let you fly. Over Jupiter and Saturn, past pitiful old Pluto even. Looking up at the single bluish, thimble-sized light in the pitch dark space of Voyager One is a contemplative experience. The time and color based installation created by artist duo Kristina Estell and David Bowen creates a sensory link between the remote object in space (the Voyager One probe) and the human experience.
But it gets lonely living “out there” and thinking “out there.” Just ask Icarus. He left Earth and got burned by the sun.
Collecting real time data from NASA’s website about the Voyager’s location, Estell and Bowen’s custom software translates this information to colors on the Red, Green and Blue (RGB) color scale. Through a virtual triangle, each color is assigned to the relative location of the sun (R), the earth (B) and the Voyager (G). As Voyager One moves through space, this distance information constantly changes and shifts the mixed color output that is captured each day on their website, www.voyager-one.com, and is illuminated in the overhead LED light at Seed Space.
But now a little purple light in a dark room in Nashville that moves in shades of red and blue and green lets us know our old friend, the robot, is still out there, still moving and shaking, still talking back to anyone who will listen.
When gazing up at the celestial bodies of the night sky, it is sometimes difficult to comprehend the vastness of space. Through The Voyager One, Estell and Bowen use the familiar medium of light and color to allow viewers to relate to such mind boggling scale in a new way. Rachel Bubis is the curator of Seed Space.
And since our friend left, Carl Sagan has died, and the pale blue dot we call home is burning. And now Jimmy Carter has cancer. But his Georgia farm boy voice is with you, Voyager and will be for a billion years. And so is the cry of that baby and the sounds of Bach and Beethoven, of Blind Willie Johnson and “Johnny B. Goode.” I hope someone finds you and your record collection before your race is run. But they might not. Sometimes love letters get lost in the mail. But this little purple light lets us know for now that you were here and there and so were we.
Caine O’Rear is a Nashville-based writer. Since 2010, he has worked as the editor-in-chief of American Songwriter magazine.
Cloud Stories Jana Harper
One thing we all have in common is a fascination with the sky. Clouds are of universal interest yet their significance and meaning is wide open to interpretation. Hermann Hesse referred to them as, “the eternal symbol of all voyaging, of every quest and yearning for home.” The Cloud Story Project aims to take the common and collective phenomena of the clouds and look at the connections and differences in how we experience them. –Jana Harper
For her Seed Social work The Cloud Story Project, Jana Harper has been working with the local community to explore notions of perspective, connection and environment through cloud imagery. Inspired by her search to recover thousands of photographic negatives of clouds taken by her mother who was diagnosed with Bipolar I, Harper aims to study, contextualize, and equalize her mother’s obsession with clouds through the thoughts, stories, and experiences of many others. Through the first half of 2015, Harper collected stories at the Nashville Public Library from staff and patrons. The stories were recorded, transcribed, edited, and re-presented alongside images from her mother’s cloud photo archive at Track One on September 5, 2015. Rachel Bubis is the curator of Seed Space.
SEED SPACE ART + TECH LAB
Artists + Curator + Writer DAVID BOWEN is a studio artist and educator whose work has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. Bowen’s work is concerned with aesthetics that result from interactive, reactive and generative processes as they relate to intersections between natural and mechanical systems. He is currently an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Physical Computing at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. RACHEL BUBIS is an independent arts writer, curator of Seed Space, and gallery manager at E. T. Burk. Her writing has appeared in Nashville Arts Magazine, Nashville Scene, Native Magazine, Art Now Nashville, Art Art Zine, Nashville Wire, and Examiner. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Rollins College. KRISTINA ESTELLis a visual artist who works primarily in the media of sculpture, installation, and painting. She is interested in themes relating to the function of the human gesture within the complex environment of the ‘natural’ and how these realms interact. Estell has exhibited work nationally and internationally as well as attended artist residencies within and outside of the US. In 2010, she was selected by artist Dan Graham to receive a full living/working fellowship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany for a competitive 10- month visual arts residency. In 2011, she was the winner of the James Hotel Chicago Artist Studio purchase prize for their permanent art collection. Invited in 2014 by the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Estell completed a large-scale sculptural installation project working from the spatial features of the Stephen D. Paine gallery as part of the resulting Surface exhibition. In January 2015, she will begin a Visiting Artist position at Illinois State University working within the department and teaching a special topic seminar. Born in Washington, D. C., JANA HARPER is a visual artist who works both collaboratively and individually on themes related to authenticity, environment, and the supernatural. She received an MFA in Printmaking and Book Arts from Arizona State University, a BA in Political Science and Fine Art from The Evergreen State College, and was in the Core Fellowship Program at the Penland School of Crafts. Her work has been shown both Nationally and Internationally and is held in both public and private collections. She teaches at Vanderbilt University. CAINE O’REAR has worked as the editor-in-chief of American Songwriter magazine since 2010.
| Upcoming Exhibitions | October 3 Eric Dickson Wars and Rumors of Wars December 5 Jeff Schmuki and Wendy Deschene Plantbot Genetics
Seed Space is a lab for site-specific installation, sculpture and performance-based art in Nashville. We support our program in three specific ways. We bring in nationally recognized art critics to write our exhibition essays. We host regularly scheduled public talks. We facilitate meetings among artists, critics and curators. Through these means we aim to foster an exchange between a growing network of local and national artistic communities, which we believe is one of the best ways to support the careers of emerging artists. Located in the Track One building in the Wedgewood Houston neighborhood of Nashville, Seed Space is supported by the Nashville Cultural Arts Project (NCAP), and is made possible with grants from the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Metro Nashville Arts Commission and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Gallery Director Rachel Bubis | Program Director Andri Alexandrou curator@seedspace.org | programs@seedspace.org www.seedspace.org