Image details from Sky Lab (2009) and Sky Lab: from where you stand (2011)
Oil on linen
The Sky Lab Project
The cultures and technologies associated with sky-situated knowledge are increasingly entering the public purview as we are looking beyond our planet to speculate about our future and place in the universe. The author and astronomer John Barrow has written, ‘We feel like the Universe’s only child and that has many consequences’.
In November 2011 Felicity Spear curated the second of two Sky Lab exhibitions at the Stephen Mclaughlan Gallery, Melbourne. The first exhibition took place in December 2009 to coincide with the International Year of Astronomy.
Titled Sky Lab: from where you stand, this exhibition included artists who presented their work at the cross disciplinary Seventh International Conference on the Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena INSAPVII (24–29 October 2010).
Bringing together both these exhibitions, a third Sky Lab exhibition is planned for the Spring of 2013 and will be hosted by Victoria’s Latrobe Regional Gallery. More »
Felicity Spear
Working with a range of media Spear's art practice has evolved through interests in history and art-historical images, optical phenomena, light and space, mapping and abstraction, and the relationship between the natural and constructed world as they are revealed through art and science and the mechanics of image capture.
In 2009, the International Year of Astronomy, Spear curated Beyond visibility: light and dust, together with astronomer and pioneering astro-photographer David Malin, exhibiting at Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne and UTS Gallery in Sydney. Gulumbu Yunupingu, one of Australia's most well know Indigenous artists, also participated.
Spear’s work was also included in the exhibition Shared Sky at the National Gallery of Victoria, Ian Potter Centre.
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