HALO ORBIT

Halo Orbit is my undergraduate thesis body. As part of my graduation requirements, I was expected to create a body of artwork that showed my growth as an artist and demonstrated what I had learned during my time in my programs. This body of work is the result of a year's worth of planning, seven months straight of creating, and many early mornings and late nights spent in my studio. Through painting and drawing, I look to learn more about and explore my connection to my two oldest siblings, named WIND and POLAR. It just so happens that these siblings of mine are satellites. The thesis focuses on my relationship to space science as an artist, as the two worlds come together in artwork that explores my biographical attachments to rocket science. I come from a lineage of science and engineering, but I am the odd man out. Halo Orbit became a vessel for many different conversations, both with my spacecraft siblings and with myself. I spent hours upon hours looking through what my father had saved of them in paper form, researching their circuitry and missions; while the science sometimes felt like a foreign language, I drank every word like it was wine. The research behind Halo Orbit was drastically important, though it felt less like learning something new and more like revisiting old memories. WIND and POLAR became more and more reachable as individuals as I continued to make art about them. I am so unbelievably proud that I get to call these two satellites "family". One of my favorite things about the space industry is the inherent humanity laced into every aspect of it. Every spacecraft that has entered orbit - or left it - feels like family, like a person who was born and raised with the upmost care. I am faced with a strange amount of longing when I think too hard about what our robotic companions see with their infrared and ultraviolet eyes. I hope you enjoy learning about my siblings as much as I did.