I was tasked to create a kite for an exhibition celebrating the artist made craft. I chose to make a dual image object honoring our space pioneers in which the top side is titled: "Thank you Icarus for daring to fly. . ." and the bottom side is titled: "Damn you Icarus for teaching us to dream. . ." I constructed the frame from wood and twine and used hot glue in lieu of wax to bind it all. The top image is acrylic and conte on canvas and the underside is acrylic with attached goose feathers. The mast has stenciled in the mission flight numbers for the space shuttles Columbia and Challenger, with seven feathers per flight lost for the astronauts who lost their lives in those tragedies. It saddens me so much that the space age has come to an end. All our technology that we take for granted, from communication, entertainment, transportation, medical and safety all owe their existence to NASA. The population as a whole has seem to forgotten that in their zeal to acquire more, faster and cheaper. Hubble alone has given us unimaginable insight into the fabric of existence and the nature of the universe. The end of the Shuttle program with no replacement in sight marks the first time in our species history in which our frontier is contracting and not expanding. This marks a possible regression into a dark age. I pray that I am wrong.
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