Free Enterprise: The Art of Citizen Space Exploration will appear at the University of California Riverside’s ARTSblock from January 19 to March 23, 2013.

The exhibition, which has been in the planning stages since 2009, will be presented in all three ARTSblock venues: the California Museum of Photography, the Culver Center of the Arts, and the Sweeney Art Gallery.

The exhibit will present the work of artists such as French choreographer Kitsou Dubois, who has flown on over 22 parabolic flights.

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Co-curator Tyler Stallings, artistic director of the Culver Center and director of Sweeney Art Gallery, said the recent events such as the SpaceX Dragon docking with ISS mark the dawn of a new kind of space race. “Outsourcing of space travel to private business represents a refocus from the cold war mentality of the 1960s in which space exploration was a grand, national assertion of collective identity, and ownership of the final frontier. In contrast, the president’s 2011 budget emphasizes private development of commercial sub-orbital flight and lunar exploration, signaling a shift from space as an abstract concept for exploration into a de-regulated realm, unconstrained, and exposed, to both socialization and capitalization. International artists will explore these untested territories with aerospace experts, engineers, scientists, visionaries and entrepreneurs.”

The exhibition may be the first of its kind in the US, but The Arts Catalyst in London has produced a number of similarly themed exhibitions. Since 2001, they have presented exhibitions on suborbital space, the International Space Station, and the Moon. The Arts Catalyst projects began with MIR (Microgravity Interdisciplinary Research), an ongoing project organized by The Arts Catalyst and the Marko Peljhan, associate professor of art and media arts and technology at UC Santa Barbara, who is also co-curating the Free Enterprise exhibition.

Written by Astro1 on May 25th, 2012 , Events

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