Capsule Shanghai is pleased to announce Alice Wang's solo exhibition at Visitor Welcome Center. For the occasion, her artist book An Atlas of Outer Space, featuring an essay by Anna Milone, will also be published.
Dates: March 16 to April 20, 2019
Venue: Visitor Welcome Center, 3006 W 7th St #200a, Los Angeles, USA
PRESS RELEASE:
The Earth is plummeting towards the Sun while just missing it.
The statement above describes both a lived reality and an apocalyptic miracle conjured by the imagination. Through research visits to geological sites and technological facilities-Alaska's Denali National Park, the Tibetan plateau, San Andreas Fault Line, the Arctic Circle, SpaceX, and Biosphere 2-Alice Wang explores the uncanny dimensions of the natural world. Fossils, meteorites, beeswax, wind, vapor, plants, plasma, and other byproducts of the universe's metabolic process present themselves in a rearrangement of time and scale. From the cosmic to the geologic to the molecular, Wang transfigures materials into sculpture, actively triggering haptic, synesthetic, and time-slip experiences.
In September 2016, China began operating the world's largest radio telescope-the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), otherwise known as Tianyan, meaning "The Eye of Heaven"-located in Guizhou. It is the first world-class radio observatory with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence as its core scientific goal. In February 2018, SpaceX launched Elon Musk's red Tesla Roadster into space in the Falcon Heavy rocket, which is now on an interstellar path towards the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. Listening for intelligent life in outer space with a radio telescope the size of a natural basin, and sending human byproducts - and eventually human life - to an extraterrestrial planet are sci-fi realities we face. Although motivated by a deep sense of curiosity and a desire for transcendence and connection, these actualities are also fraught with darker forces of violence and domination.
Oscillating within the threshold of the real and the imaginary, Wang examines both the technologies of space exploration and the underlying desires to leave planet Earth and make contact with extraterrestrial life. The result is a quivering disorientation of one's sense of place and scale within an otherworldly landscape, a longing for intimacy in distance, difference, and life beyond our Sun.
