Kal Spelletich "Where's My Jetpack?!"
Jack Hanley
This event has ended.
Before flying was a means to an end, it was a sensation. The perennial struggle to fly aimed for the deep-rooted joy of weightlessness, a release from our own corporeality, and the all-too-human satisfaction of “touching the sky”. The flying machine made the human superhuman. For Kal Spelletich, flight’s future promise may be gone but not forgotten – Where are the jetpacks? The flying cars, escape pods, gravity boots, moon colonies? This is supposed to be the future. Where’s My Jetpack?! takes us back to a moment of invention. Or perhaps, reminds us that its time is now.
As always with flight, there is an element of danger. The aspiration to conquer the sky comes with a gut-wrenching fear of free fall, an Icaran fate. Machinery may have liberated the body from gravity, but not the mind; Spelletich asks us to consider how the body might transcend the mind in order to free it as well. The installation will include motorized, human-scale jetpacks hanging from the gallery ceiling. These and other machines, robots, photographs and video observe the fact that we are still participants in an ancient and ongoing struggle against gravity.
Kal Spelletich received his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and currently lives and works in San Francisco, California. Spelletich helped found SEEMEN, a collective of individuals who enjoy building extreme machines and robots that they allow their audience to operate. He is a notorious guerilla gardener and activist. He has also worked with the legendary machine performance art group, Survival Research Laboratories.
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Schedule
from July 09, 2011 to August 13, 2011
Summer Hours: Monday through Friday 10am - 5pm
Closing Reception on 2011-08-12 from 18:00 to 20:00