Michael Benson: Planetfall
January 22 - April 5, 2025
Main Gallery
Curator: Paul Roth
Since the early 1960s, a succession of spacecraft, launched and controlled remotely, have voyaged through the solar system, photographing and feeding back to Earth a steady stream of extraterrestrial imagery. Using this raw picture data, sourced from space agency archives, American artist Michael Benson processes, reworks, and composites individual frames to produce highly detailed images of the planets and their orbiting moons. His photographs show these celestial bodies from unusual vantage points and render light and color with startling clarity. Benson’s appropriation and reinvention of images taken by robotic spacecraft offers an astonishing alternative to society’s visual clichés of outer space, restoring a sense of wonder to scenes beyond the reach of mankind.
Public Programming
Artist Talk: Michael Benson
IMC Great Hall
Thursday, January 23
7 p.m.
Exhibition Tour: Planetfall
Main Gallery
Wednesday, February 26
6 p.m.
Michael Benson, Eclipse of the Sun by Earth, April 2, 2011, digital chromogenic print (made 2012). Credit: NASA SDO/NASA. © Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.
Michael Benson, Above Saturn’s North Pole, October 10, 2013, digital chromogenic print (made 2012). Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI/Cornell. © Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.
Biographies
Artist Bio
Michael Benson’s work focuses on the intersection of art and science. It spans a range of media, from large-format photographic images to nonfiction books and essays, illustrated books, films and visual-effects sequences. Over the last decade, Benson has staged a series of increasingly ambitious shows of digitally-constructed extraterrestrial landscapes, both in museums and art galleries worldwide. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other venues. A recent Visiting Scholar at the MIT Media Lab, Michael Benson is a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities. For the last few years Benson has been using scanning electron microscopes (SEMs) to focus on natural design at sub-millimeter scales for a project titled Nanocosmos.
Curator Bio
Paul Roth has been Director of The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University since 2013. Previously, he served as Senior Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC; as Executive Director of The Richard Avedon Foundation in New York; and as archivist of the Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Since 1990, he has organized (or co-organized) more than 100 museum exhibitions and film programs, including Stories from the Picture Press: Black Star Publishing Co. and The Canadian Press (2023-2024); Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story (2018); Jim Goldberg: Rich and Poor (2018); Edward Burtynsky: Oil (2009); and Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power (2008). He is author and co-editor of Gordon Parks: Collected Works (Steidl, 2012), among many other titles.
