Singular Oscillations: Playback, Video stills, 2013
Courtesy Bradley Pitts, ©Bradley Pitts, 2013. All rights reserved.
Brooklyn based artist and engineer Bradley Pitts is currently in a group exhibition that is on view in California at the Sweeney Gallery of Art, Riverside Campus, University of California, California Museum of Photography and Culver Center of the Arts. Co-curated by Tyler Stallings, Artistic Director of the Culver Center of the Arts and Director of Sweeney Art Gallery, and by Marko Peljhan, Associate Professor of Art and Media Arts and Technology at UC Santa Barbara the exhibition features the work of 25 artists and organizations who have placed a focus on collaborations with aerospace agencies with the goal of researching the cultural and personal inquiry in regards to space exploration.
Singular Oscillations: Playback, Video stills, 2013
Courtesy Bradley Pitts, ©Bradley Pitts, 2013. All rights reserved.

The exhibition, titled FREE ENTERPRISE: The Art of Citizen Space Exploration, seeks to offer a glimpse into the technicalities of space travel as transmitted through the projects and eyes of the artists involved. Pitts’ contribution titled Singular Oscillations is an eleven-channel video documenting the artist in 25 second intervals of weightlessness in a craft that was built solely for the purpose of allowing astronauts the exercise for physical sensation of being without gravity. The resulting film will be shown throughout the duration of the exhibition featuring the artist, nude and in a state whereas body mass is irrelevant.  Seeing the artist float nude in this environment also likens to the experience of being in the womb. Without the comfort of amniotic fluid, the umbilical cord and a mother’s warmth, this might be the closest that the artist will ever get to returning to a moment of infancy, interior in nature and now removed, fast forwarded and fleeting.

From Executive Producer of Pitts studio Cheryl Kaplan:

In terms of the flight Bradley took, it did not go into space per se, it is a special flight created by the Russians used to simulate conditions of space that produced 20 maneuvers, each creating 25 second periods of weightlessness and double-gravity. Imagine a level, and what happens to allow the bubble in the level to float and achieve balance and suspension. Bradley looked at the aircraft as a lab and the mechanism of flying and the actions of the pilots is analogous to a control room. Bradley had access to the aircraft independently and with the help of Projekt Atol Flight Operations, founded by Marko Peljhan, the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (GCTC) and the pilots of the parabolic-flight aircraft (IL76-MDK). 

Singular Oscillations: Playback, Video stills, 2013
Courtesy Bradley Pitts, ©Bradley Pitts, 2013. All rights reserved.
FREE ENTERPRISE, presented by UCR ARTSblock, lends itself as a visual response to the concept of personal/private space travel outside that sponsored by the federal government. The show includes artists ranging from Bradley Pitts to Forrest Myers, Trevor Paglen, Final Frontier Design and Kitsou Dubois to Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung, The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), Lowry Burgess and XCOR Aerospace, The Arts Catalyst and others. They have placed a focus on the aesthetics of “reframing of the aerospace industry from its historical mission of data acquisition to one that includes cultural inquiry. This shift recognizes that the scientific community is no longer the sole channel of access to Space, its information and experience” (from the press release). The exhibition is on view at the Sweeney Gallery from January 19th-March 23rd, 2013.
More soon.
xo