Steve McQueen: Once Upon a Time · April 25 to July 5, 2009
Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 25, 3 to 5 p.m.
In 1977, at one of the most optimistic points of the NASA space program, scientists placed a gold-plated copper disk of 116 images representative of life on earth on two space probes, Voyager I and Voyager II. The idea was that if extraterrestrials found and figured out how to access this Golden Record, they would have a complete picture of life on Earth at that time. In 2002, British artist Steve McQueen produced Once Upon a Time, an installation that projects all 116 images, accompanied by a soundtrack of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. Once Upon a Time will be at the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre April 25 to July 5.
McQueen is particularly interested in the notion of time embodied by the NASA images. Though created in 1977, they were meant to represent Earth into an infinite future. The unfamiliar sounds and words of the soundtrack underscore the images’ potential to alienate – recognizable images are connected with something ultimately strange and indecipherable.
An artist and filmmaker, McQueen won the Camera d’Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival for his film Hunger, about Irish republican hunger striker Bobby Sands. Winner of the Turner Prize in 1999, he will represent Britain at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Since the early 1990s, McQueen has been internationally recognized for his groundbreaking work in film and video. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world, including Documenta 11, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
In conjunction with the exhibition Once Upon a Time, on May 28 The Banff Centre will host a talk by Saul Ostrow, chair of visual arts and technologies at the Cleveland Institute of Art and senior faculty for the Centre’s creative residency Analogous Fields: Art and Science. The talk is titled “Reviewing Distance Learning: Steve McQueen’s Objectivity.”
Once Upon a Time is on loan from the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada.
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