Sci-Fi/Fan Culture

SYNOPSIS

Theatre of the Exploding Sun explored various facets of science fiction (Sci-Fi) fan culture, and ideas stemming from my interest in areas in which reality and fiction overlap and blur. Employing new theories of fandom, the exhibition will open up a range of possibilities with regards to consumption, production, criticality, and play, complicating assumptions about the “fan” across disciplines.

This touring exhibit riffed off of the phenomena of fan films in popular culture, in which largely amateur auteurs create films that ape their favorite Sci-Fi movies, comic books, or TV shows. I created an alter ego, Eton Corrasable who was the protagonist of this series of films. Eton was an avid science fiction fan and fringe scientist who claims to be traveling through time following his last visit to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty earthwork.

This exhibition explored psycho-geography, mental mapping, and cultural theory around Sci-Fi fan culture to extend notions of the landscape by exploring the social and personal geographies that are tied to particular spaces. This exhibition also made reference to the iconic artist Robert Smithson’s interest in science fiction. Smithson used the spiral shape of his famous Spiral Jetty earthwork to give form to the idea of time travel previously explored in his essay, The Shape of the Future and Memory. During this period, the spiral image was a mainstay of contemporary iconography for time travel and featured in television shows such as Dr. Who and Star Trek.

This work functioned on several levels at any given point of engagement; sometimes spoofing the forms it imitates, in other ways paying homage both to past artists, and achievement in science fiction alike. These, and other notions, were explored in the accompanying 104 page, full-colour catalogue with texts written by Kelowna Art Gallery curator, Liz Wylie, the Vancouver educator and art historian, Dr. Charlotte Townsend-Gault, artist Peter Morin, and Southern Alberta Art Gallery curator, Ryan Doherty.

PRESS

Keith Langergraber: Theatre of the Expoloding Sun – Kasia Sonowski, Border Crossings, December 2014.
Keith’s Cults – Charlotte Townsend Gault, Theatre of the Exploding Sun (exhibition catalogue) 2013.
Remaking Research (exhibition catalogue), Emily Carr University, 2012.