foldable plexi shield, acoustic foam, lunar sample #15415 replica, lunar
regolith simulant, a model cardboard ark and casts of paws & hooves ...
—– Drum Shield Affordance Extension 1.1
Extravehicular Activity 2020
It starts with a moonshot, not just in the aspirational sense. What happens once the engines fall silent and the Eagle has landed? The reality is intensely visceral: boots settling in lunar regolith, electrolyte imbalance, heart arrhythmia. The physical weight of Discovery.
The astronaut James Irwin was the lunar module pilot for Apollo 15, and the eighth person to walk on the moon. His was the first “J” Mission, longer than previous landings and correspondingly more extreme in its toll on the body. On his mission, Irwin collected Apollo’s most significant lunar mineral sample, dubbed by the media, “the Genesis Rock”. While traversing the lunar surface, Irwin claimed voices were guiding him in his work, and towards the location of the sample. When the Genesis Rock was dated, its age came to 4-billion years … and counting.
Returning to earth, Irwin took with him not just the mineral samples, but the voices, too, and a different timeline was conjured inside him. Now sublunary, Irwin went on to found an evangelical organization endorsing a biblical worldview in which the Genesis-based creation narrative sees the world being created in 6 days then drowned in a global flood some 4,500 years ago. Genesis Rock notwithstanding, Irwin’s next years were spent in locating Noah’s Ark. The voices never went away for Irwin, but the ship that saved all species and landed them a new life, on a renewed planet, remains on the mountain unfounded.
IN EXHIBITION:
2021 «The Earth Is Flat Again« Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź
2020 «Michael Stevenson« Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam
2020 «Disproof Does Not Equal Disbelief« Fine Arts, Sydney
