Space is, as any Star Trek fan will know, the final frontier. Not to say that we’ve explored almost all the universe, far from it. We are nowhere near having discovered anything of any significance, leaving an unbelievably, vast universe free for our imaginations to roam unhindered by reality. Space is the ultimate unknowable; humans have always had a romanticised view of the unknown; whether the birth of gods and goddesses; the serpents of the seas and other worlds – living or dead. We have wondered what was out there and in doing so have created living worlds through our various depictions to visualise our fantasies locked inside us.

 

As a child, Michael Lewy built a spaceship in his closet. Taking the needle of his record player, crushing it into the turntable to make a rocket sound and hammering a lucite coat hanger into the floor as a steering wheel. His handprinted view screen had a planet in the distance, and a piece of glass that looked like a rock as a power source.

 

Lewy has sewn his works into one dreamlike, ephemeral, narrative. Inspired by TV shows such as Lost in Space, the Six Million Dollar Man, and Land of the Lost and combined with the memories of the building secret spaceships and sketching alien landscapes, we see strange planets made on Hollywood sound stages and spacemen floating in the black void. He’s able to return to that childlike, limitlessly visionary state and sculpt new narratives from cardboard, styrofoam, paint, smoke, and costumes.

Bigfoot Island, is suggestive of a children’s television show that might have existed between the channels, a reconstructed diary of channel surfing from Lewy’s childhood. These still and moving images, created with a blend of analog and digital processes, function both as dioramas to be observed and as a secret distant world you might explore in person, if only you could find your way there...

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Michael Lewy is an artist who works in a variety of media including photography, video and computer graphics. Making art for spaces that are often bare of even desolation, and utilizes common usually office-related objects to then re-interpret or re-examine them in an abstractified way.