It seems that things that fall to earth inspire an array of interesting responses in us: fear, curiosity, anger, awe and that age-old feeling that we may not be totally alone in the universe.
It was the impact of two things that crashed to earth which sparked the imaginations of David Carson, Brian McClave and George Millward, the artists behind SKYLAB.
Employing old and new technologies, research techniques and art forms the SKYLAB artistic team set out to examine the impact of these two objects: a massive meteorite and an experimental space station, one ancient and cosmic, the other man-made and technically sophisticated.
SKYLAB’s ideas and stories revolve around the two remote sites in Western Australia in which these things landed and form a kind of matrix connecting the ancient with the modern, the poetic with the scientific and the real with the imagined.
A chance visit to the Shire of Esperance Municipal Museum, which proudly displays a sizeable chunk of Skylab, the ill-fated NASA space station that had descended upon the region during a cold July night in 1979, appealed to the artists’ interests in space-age technology, astronomy and museology as well as to their sense of the absurd. Amy Barrett-Lennard Director, Linden St Kilda Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2003
out of orbit - catalogue
http://skylabexhibition.org.au/skylabcatalogue.htm
"Skylab show out of this world"
http://skylabexhibition.org.au/skylabtitle.htm
