Windowkammers

2009

Until 2009, the fallen spacecraft had always been displayed in a sort of guerilla manner; it was installed as quickly and silently as possible at night in a public space, un-announced, un-titled and un-explained and as if it had crash-landed. In the 2009 Portland "Windowkammers" installation, and as subsequently displayed at the Owlshead Transportation Museum, the ship has been re-interpreted. Titled Now Your Spacecraft Will Be Your Peace, the ship is currently presented as a sort of captured, or discovered artifact of imagined flight, substantiated by all of the related ephemera I could conjure up. It is staged as a taxidermied animal might appear in a natural history or science museum – as if it had once roamed the earth (or sky), or at least as best we can tell from the evidence we have. All of the text panels are excerpted verbatim from a 1953 children's book of space (The First Book of Space Travel by Jeanne Bendick), but have been ran through the translation program Systran into Russian, and then back into English. The American Dream Technical Institute is the conceptual framework within which I now present this work in the public sphere. This work will be featured in the 2010 DeCordova Biennial Exhibition in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Windowkammers: Now Your Spacecraft Will Be Your Peace installation was made possible by the Space Gallery of Portland, Maine and the Maine Arts Commission.