[extreme environments]
Celeste Connor
Arda
Solaris Prime
On “Arda” and “Solaris Prime”
The Planet Series, 3D and digital images, pays homage to early and contemporary speculative lit and poems that evoke existing, conjectured, and fictive planets of our solar system and far beyond.
“Arda” and “Solarus Prime” are select examples of recent digitized prints. Their titles allude to “places” familiar from the speculative genre: non-terrestrial environments with determining force on the shape of creatures that inhabit or visit them. Their otherworldly climates and geographical features engage the animal psyche on the deepest ontological level of becoming with remarkable, unpredictable affects. These created environs test the limits of human invention and perception; one ponders unfathomable epochal spans and immeasurable geologic timeframes. Objects for contemplation, the works are meant to exercise and expand imaginations in dark times.
Celeste Connor has a PhD in Modern/Postmodern Art History from U.C. Berkeley. She teaches at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, where she received an MFA. Her second book, An Ecofeminist View of the Mad Max Series, examines the dystopian films from an Eco-Feminist perspective. The artist-critic’s reviews appear in Artweek, Women’s Studies Journal, Women of Vision, Public Art Review, Plastic Antinomy, and on websites including Stretcher, The East Bay Voice, ComPAct, and Daily Serving. Connor’s videos have screened at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Herbst Hall, Berkeley, and The Honolulu Center for the Arts. Her digital prints have been exhibited at SOMAR Gallery in San Francisco’s Mission District, Salon II in Berkeley, and The Ecotopian Archive, Oakland.