29.5 Earth Days, 2024
Weather Balloon, Helium, Embroidered Ribbon, Antique Glass Slides of the Sun and the Moon, Copper, Solder, Hardware, Rugpad
The artist that always comes to mind and has most influenced my own love affair with the moon is Etel Adnan. To Look at the Sea is to Become What One is was gifted to me years ago and the “Arab Apocalypse”, a book long poem written in 1975-76, left a lasting impression with its sketches and re-imaginings of the Sun and the Moon. In Adnan’s early work the Moon was crucial, offering “both an escape from and a realization of war and desolation, which were Adnan’s primary subjects throughout the 1960s and 1970s, from the Lebanese Civil War to Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the war in Vietnam.” This time period also coincided with the nuclear missile arms race and the first moon landing. In Andrew Durbin’s essay on Adnan from 2014 he discusses the significance of cosmic forces in her work and notes that “as I write this the Israeli Defense Forces are bombing the Gaza Strip, land it has illegally occupied since 1967, a year after Moonshots was released.” 10 years later, upwards of 46,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks just as this year NASA and President Biden called for the establishment of a time zone on the Moon to benefit “all spacefaring nations.”
The sub-heading of the Artemis Accords, a series of guidelines signed by 39 countries for exploration on the Moon, Mars, and beyond, is “Principles for a Safe, Peaceful, and Prosperous Future.” It is believed that the Moon is host to mineral and gaseous deposits such as rare earth minerals, water, titanium and oxygen. The Moon is also host to a large reserve of Helium 3, an element thought to be able to more safely produce “clean” energy. Presented under the guise of exploration and invention, the creation of a Coordinated Lunar Time or CLT would streamline the prospecting of the Moon and empower those that establish its parameters. 29.5 Earth Days, named after the amount of time that passes in a day on the Moon, is a mobile that prompts the viewer to see the Sun and Moon with awe and wonder as a child might, while also considering the devastation and loss wrought by the pursuit of power and finite resources.
Photos Courtesy of Constance Mensh