Crank departs from the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Mission, that engineered moment of Cold War cooperation, to probe the fragility of political and physical systems through the strange parallax of space. The mission’s orchestrated “handshake in space,” staged for camera and world, is reframed here as a gesture laden with symbolism amid ideological conflict.
The exhibition presents objects of ambiguous lineage, including space-flown artifacts, subtle references to miscommunication, and gestures drawn from the mission’s training, engineering, and production phases. Works include chocolate coin forgeries, refrigerators recast as space capsules, plants crafted using traditional Chinese paper techniques, materials originally developed for space exploration, and an over-engineered surveillance robot devised in collaboration with an electrical engineer. These artworks examine protocols of authenticity and the absurdities that emerge as entities negotiate trust. Despite the gravitational weight of its themes, the exhibition remains buoyant and unexpected, an invitation to imagine weightless forms of political poetics.
Fumes, 2025
NASA innovated space blankets, gaffer tape, double sided tape, steel aircraft cable
Dimensions Variable
Marrow, 2025
Found refrigerator, NASA innovated space blankets, steel hardware, racket strap, breadcrumbs, sand, epoxy resin, steel wire, ramen, incandescent lights
Marrow is a stripped-down refrigerator with exposed insulation, lined with space blankets. Inside, the upward-stretched arm of a Han Dynasty jade suit is reconstructed from ramen, preserved in resin. In this context, the refrigerator operates both as a site of display and preservation, and as a poetic device that embodies containment, incubation, the pod, the cubicle, and the coffin.
During the Han Dynasty, tradition held that the dead would travel both downward into the earth and upward into the sky. Jade, a material symbolizing the color of the sky yet extracted from the ground, served as a metaphor for this dual journey. Similarly, ramen was developed as a storable and accessible solution to combat famine, symbolizing both permanence and immediacy, drawing a parallel between survival, temporality, and the cycles of life and death.
Third Party, 2025
Found refrigerators, construction lights, NASA innovated space blankets, racket straps, AI manipulated images, image transfers, media players, LED screens, cast iron, zip ties, breadcrumbs, sand, silver commemorative coin celebrating Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (1975), birthday candles, electrical plug prongs, steel wire, found refrigerator door, NASA innovated memory foam
Flatpack, 2025
NASA innovated memory foam, found refrigerator doors, elastic, stainless steel, discarded
specimen trays from natural history museum, aluminum, sand, clay, breadcrumbs, liquified
carbon, marble, silicon carbide, carbon, soap
Flatpack references the 1975 handshake in space between American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, a symbolic moment of cooperation during the Cold War. The work incorporates elastic restraints to secure orbs, mirroring the method used to anchor food on the dining surface during the post-handshake celebratory meal in microgravity. A commemorative coin, purportedly containing metal from both spacecraft, was sourced from eBay and used to create foil wrappers reminiscent of chocolate coins. However, these wrappers contain no chocolate, underscoring the event’s propagandistic nature. The orbs themselves are constructed from materials chosen for their functional or geological significance, emphasizing themes of practicality, groundedness, and the intersection of history, myth, and material culture.
Thale Cress, 2025
White letter paper printed with short story referenced in title, liquefied carbon, powdered carbon, resin, bamboo, Mars Global (MGS-1) High-Fidelity Martian Regolith Simulant, gel medium, super glue, steel wire, reclaimed aluminum can
Thale Cress: The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
Thale Cress: There Will Come Soft Rains
Thale Cress: Tower of Babylon
Thale Cress takes its name from a plant commonly used by space agencies in experiments because of its sensitivity to radiation. In this context, the plant becomes a symbol of extraterrestrial agriculture and the possibility of long-term space habitation. By connecting food cultures to space exploration, the work also draws attention to the historical entanglement of food and empire, tracing how canned rations from colonial expeditions persist in new forms, such as the widespread adoption of Spam in the Pacific following violent U.S. military interventions.
The series incorporates Martian Regolith Simulant, a soil analogue used by scientists to test food cultivation on Mars. It also features “liquified carbon,” a tongue-in-cheek substitute for Chinese calligraphy ink, an intentional code-switch that can read as either “traditional” or “technical” depending on cultural lens.
Science fiction stories printed on white office paper—Ted Chiang’s Tower of Babylon, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, and Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains—serve as conceptual anchors. Like the materials that shape each object, the stories carry frameworks of inquiry into history, ethics, and metaphysical limits. The text is not an afterthought but a material in its own right.
Dust Breeder, 2025
(In Collaboration with Mattia Vezzoli)
Robot, mirrored security dome, UV light, UV ink, orbital path