Exhibition
Kennedy Space Center
Space Shuttle Atlantis
Location
FL, USA
Year
2018
EXHIBITIONS
California Science Center Museum I Kennedy Space Center
Rémy x Atlantis: The Infinite and the Iconic
People look to the stars, but the real story lies in how we get there. Atlantis belongs to that history. Across thirty-three missions, the shuttle travelled approximately 126 million miles, carrying people, equipment and scientific instruments beyond Earth and back again. It flew twelve missions to the International Space Station and, in 2009, carried the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.
Rémy approached space from another direction. His paintings drew on the visual language of popular culture, often placing familiar figures inside spacesuits. Mickey Mouse, David Bowie and the Joker entered the work already carrying histories of their own, but the suit disturbed those identities. Removed from their usual worlds, the characters became less certain.
In 2018, these works entered the institutional world of space exploration through presentations at the Kennedy Space Center and the California Science Center. At Kennedy, Atlantis introduced a reality against which Rémy’s fictional astronauts could be read differently. The shuttle did not symbolize the possibility of travelling into space. It had travelled there. It had been engineered, flown, damaged, repaired and returned.
The farther the figure is placed from the familiar world, the more clearly vulnerability begins to surface.
The space between the painted astronaut and the machine that had actually made the journey is where the exhibition finds its meaning.
Exhibition
California Science Center Museum
Space Shuttle Endeavour
Location
CA, USA
Year
2018
Rémy x Endeavour : The soul Beneath the steel
Endeavour entered the Space Shuttle program through loss. Built to replace Challenger after its destruction in 1986, the shuttle made its first flight in 1992 and completed twenty-five missions before its final landing in 2011. It spent 299 days in space and travelled more than 122 million miles. Its history begins not with expansion, but with the decision to continue.
Rémy’s work brings another kind of history beneath Endeavour. Mickey Mouse, David Bowie, the visual language of Pop and echoes of Hockney’s California coexist with the astronaut, as if fragments of twentieth-century culture had been sent into orbit together. The painting does not illustrate space. It carries our images into it.
Placed in the presence of Endeavour, those images acquire another weight. The shuttle carries the physical history of leaving Earth and returning. Rémy’s paintings carry the cultural images through which generations learned to dream, rebel and imagine themselves elsewhere. One travelled through space; the other through memory and culture.
Endeavour has completed the journey it was built to make, while the images beneath it remain open, still moving between recognition and uncertainty. Where Atlantis carries the force of departure, Endeavour carries the weight of return. The machine has finished travelling. The image is still searching.
