GALLERY 2
LOST IN SPACE
LISA BENSON (NZ)
Lost in Space Lost In Space is from a collection of drawings and photographs made at Mount John Observatory and the Chancellor Dome at the top of the Fox Glacier in the South Island of New Zealand. The tools used were a series of makeshift pinhole cameras strapped to a tripod engineered for tracking celestial bodies – to move at the same pace as the earth rotates. Each discarded 4×5 film box points to a region of the sky containing a star on a SETI top hit list of stars – stars that have conditions similar enough to our sun so that orbiting planets may sustain life similar to life on earth. The images are gathered light from these regions of the sky, the film exposed for the full duration of a southern New Zealand winter’s darkness…all night long. The possibility of this extremely old light traveling such a vast distance and through a small hole in a cardboard box is as futile as it is poetic. The chances of life as we know it on the planets around these stars is as slim as the chance of their stars light making an image on the 4×5 film at the back of these small cardboard boxes…but the image is here.
