FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

CONTACT:
Lita Albuquerque, Artist
310-315-1565
studio@litaalbuquerque.com
litaalbuquerque.com

National Science Foundation invites artist Lita Albuquerque to create art installation “Stellar Axis” on Antarctic Ice Shelf in December 2006

Los Angeles, CA, July 2006 – Lita Albuquerque, an internationally renowned artist widely acclaimed for her Earth Art in the natural landscape, has been invited by the National Science Foundation’s Artists and Writers Program to produce a large scale installation “Stellar Axis: Antarctica” on the Antarctic Ice Shelf.

Envisioned as phase one of a two-part project, it will culminate at the North Pole and symbolize a shaft of starlight aligned with the rotational axis of Earth, this ephemeral artwork will be a major extension of her commitment to develop a visual language that addresses the realities of vast time and space.

“Stellar Axis” is a culmination of Albuquerque’s decades-long exploration into the relationship between the stellar and the terrestrial through large-scale installations and interventions in the landscape and has a unique geographic and scientific significance being located in both the north and South Pole region.

Albuquerque – a pioneering member of the first generation of Earth artists – who executed her works in vast expanses of deserts around the globe, will be creating her largest work to date in the Antarctic landscape. The concept of this work derived from her research in archaeoastronomy, was initially inspired by a vision of a planet where gold tipped pyramids were on the surface, aligned to the stars above. Albuquerque will create a star map “reflection” of the stars on the ice, drawing attention to the Earth surrounded by starlight. “By doing a star alignment on the ice at both poles, it engages the whole planet,” Albuquerque says, “I am interested in creating a mental image of the patterns aligning. In a way, it is like taking a snapshot of a moment in time when the stars are aligned to the pattern on the ground, so that the ‘picture’ is an accurate picture of not just a planet floating in space, but a planet surrounded by a vast circulatory system of stars of which we are a part.” As with the work of her contemporaries James Turrell, Charles Ross and Michael Heizer, “Stellar Axis: Antarctica” is a modern art version of Ancient astronomical sites.

Placing the team members: Astronomer Simon P. Balm, Documentary Filmmaker, Sophie Pegrum, Photographer/Filmmaker, Aernout Overbeeke, Photographer, Jean de Pomereu, on a fast track, the NSF awarded the grant in April and will deploy the team at McMurdo Station, Ross Island, Antarctica, the first week of December 2006. The installation itself will consist of ninety-nine blue spheres that will reflect a portion of the southern sky on the exact date of the Summer Solstice. Each sphere in the piece will be positioned mirroring a star’s location in the sky and placed near McMurdo Sound, in front of the active volcano Mount Erebus.

With the guidance of the NSF, the installation will be fulfilling the stringent environmental constraints on the Antarctic Continent while highlighting the pivotal connections between the Antarctic as locus for scientific research and the concepts of mapping, identity and the cosmos through Albuquerque’s art expedition.

Gallery shows and talks by Albuquerque and the accompanying astronomer, Dr. Simon Balm, are planned as well as a series of presentations at the Artist’s studio.



QUOTES:

“This is an ambitious project with multiple references and the potential for extraordinary resonances. While the work itself will be ephemeral, it will result in a considerable body of documentation as well as ancillary artworks. Ms Albuquerque’s powers as an artist have gained strength steadily throughout the course of her career, and North Pole South Pole Stellar Axis promises to be her most remarkable and compelling work to date.”

Jeremy Strick ,Director,
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

“Through careful and effective documentation of her visually stunning and intellectually stimulating projects, Albuquerque has earned the widespread attention of an international audience and well-deserved critical acclaim though her many exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world.” 

Howard N. Fox
Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

“Albuquerque’s current proposal at the South Pole is surely her most momentous work to date.  The documentation expected to result from this project would draw wide public interest from school children to adults.”

Kerry Brougher
Director of Art and Programs/Chief Curator,
Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

“Lita’s work speaks eloquently to the basic urges of both disciplines – avid curiosity, a sense of awe and scale, and a sensation of mystery beckoning the human mind.  Her work resonates with profound emotion modulated with the knowledge to be gained when art couples with science to understand our world.  In this regard she is a pioneer in an intensifying artistic movement worldwide.”

Stephen Nowlin, Director,
Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery Art Center College of Design, Pasadena

“The subject of the intersections of Antarctica as a place with its own political and cultural heritage is insufficiently known to us and I can only imagine that Lita would illuminate new ideas and concepts within her own artistic framework that would be simultaneously stimulating and beautiful.”

Selma Holo, Ph.D.,
Director Fisher Gallery and Museum Studies, University of Southern California.

“Albuquerque’s present proposal for the Polar regions grows out of a prescient artistic understanding of how badly we need to raise stellar awareness of aesthetic, mythic and scientific symbolic structures concerning Earth’s place in the universe and its survival in this age of increased global warming.”

M.A. Greenstein, Ph.D.
Graduate Faculty Art Center College of Design, Pasadena

“Astronomy, as indeed philosophy and theology, have their origins in our eternal quest to find out where we are in space and time and how we fit into the larger universe.  Lita’s projects draw their strength from highlighting and visualizing these eternal questions and themes.”

The late Jon Hodge, Director,
John Drescher Planetarium, Santa Monica College.

“Her works embody a sensitive grasp of the power of transformation in both the art world and in the public realm.”

Stanley and Elyse Grinstein, Patron of the Arts