Spiders from Mars
Textiles and Video
by Sabrina Ratté and Ben Venom
Curated by Clark Buckner
In partnership with The Foundation at St. Joseph’s Arts Society
January 17th – February 20th, 2020
Opening reception:
Friday. 1/17, 7:00 – 9:00
Artist Talk:
Wednesday, 2/5, 7:00 – 9:00
Gallery Hours: Mon – Fri, 10 – 6
Address: St. Joseph’s Arts Society, 1415 Howard St (at 10th St.),
Website: www.tttelematiccc.com
Email: gallery@tttelematiccc.com
Phone: 415-359-6613
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Apocryphally, in 1968, David Bowie conceived of Ziggy Stardust, his androgynous alien alter ego, after attending a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Kubrick’s film, science-fiction is an existential meditation on the limits of reason and experience, a journey to the outermost reaches of the universe in which we find ourselves confronted with the alien irrationality of our own orienting contradictions. Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust gives these existential conflicts a throbbing pulse, marrying the cosmic ruminations in Kubrick’s film to the subversive power and alien strangeness of adolescent sexuality in Rock and Roll: as an uncanny figure of the future, an avatar of what’s to come.
This show takes its inspiration from Bowie’s starman, and the broader, varied intersections between Science Fiction and Rock and Roll – from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Queen’s soundtrack to Flash Gordon to Laurie Anderson’s Big Science and the afrofuturism of Parliament-Funkadelic – by juxtaposing Sabrina Ratté’s digital animation with Ben Venom’s heavy-metal textiles.
