MCA Screen: A Space Program with Tom Sachs
Featured image
Poster for A Space Program, 2015
About
In A Space Program, internationally acclaimed artist Tom Sachs takes us on an intricately handmade journey to the red planet, providing audiences with an intimate, firsthand look into his studio and methods. A conversation between Tom Sachs and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Joey Orr follows the screening.
Video
Lt. Samantha Ratanarat harvest opium latex at the Bio Lab on Mars
Photo: Josh WhiteAbout the Artist
Tom Sachs's genre-defying mixed media sculptures, often re-creations of modern icons using everyday materials, show all of the work that goes into producing an object—a reversal of modernization's trend towards products with cleaner, simpler, and more perfect edges. Sachs's sculptures are conspicuously handmade; lovingly cobbled together from plywood, resin, steel, and ceramic. The scars and imperfections in the sculptures tell the story of how it came into being and remove it from the realm of miraculous conception. His studio team of ten, functions like a teaching hospital or cult, that worships plywood and an ethos of transparency. Known as an “Artist's artist” Sachs's work is loved by children and widely imitated by young artists in search of their own voice. His film
collaborations with director Van Neistat (since 2001) have served to represent the aspects of the sculptures that exist in time. View them all at tenbullets.com.
Sachs's SPACE PROGRAM first launched in 2007 with a mission to the moon at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles. In 2012 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, Sachs and his team ventured further than any human before by taking his SPACE PROGRAM to Mars in search of life beyond Earth. By using all of their resources and man power, they embark on a journey that, through their labor and commitment, becomes as real as any other NASA mission. By realizing details to an extreme degree the experience becomes authentic.