Join us on Thursday, July 31 for a discussion of Alejandro A. Barbosa’s monumental new installation I Got Us the Moon, featuring the artist in conversation with Curator Elliott Ramsey. At the talk, The Polygon Gallery is pleased to be launching a new, limited-edition artist publication by Barbosa, on the occasion of his exhibition.

Doors at 7:00
Conversation at 7:30

Followed by a Deckchair Cinema screening of The Fifth Element.

Admission is by a suggested donation of $10-$20, courtesy of BMO Financial Group

RSVPs are helpful

Alejandro A. Barbosa: I Got Us the Moon is on view until September 28

About the exhibition
I Got Us the Moon presents a monumental new work by Vancouver-based Argentinian artist Alejandro A. Barbosa, consisting of 280 individual prints tiled together to form an atlas of the moon. The image is drawn from the “CGI Moon Kit”, a publicly available digital asset for non-scientific purposes, created from data assembled by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera and NASA’s laser altimeter instrument teams. Combining his extensive research with this specific, aesthetic representation of the moon, Barbosa steps into the role of amateur astronomer – astronomy being notable as one of the only scientific fields to which hobbyists make meaningful contributions.

Motivated by the current potential of a new space race, with the moon viewed as an asset to colonise or mine for resources, Barbosa engages with histories of naming-as-claiming, while disrupting the exclusive naming rights of the International Astronomical Union. These rights were granted in 1982 by the United Nations as a way to standardise a proliferation of systems by which lunar features had, until then, been named. Barbosa references these prior histories, here renaming lunar geographical features after a wide range of figures: some unknown, others infamous, and many significant to queer and feminist histories. In doing so, Barbosa posits the Earth’s satellite not as a commodity or frontier, but rather as a parallel world: one that becomes a site of collective fantasies, alternate timelines, and queer world-building.