UNCALIBRATED BY HONDARTZA FRAGA

CURATOR: Court Spencer
DATE: July 2023
VENUE: Sunny Bank Mills

This solo exhibition by Hondartza Fraga was the culmination of over six years of artistic research exploring the history of our relationship with Saturn through drawings, installations, photographs, sound, digital works, and an artist’s book.

The catalyst for the research was the unprocessed images from the Cassini mission (1997-2017). This set of almost 400,000 raw images preserves the imaging errors and glitches captured across the mission over two decades. This set of uncalibrated images is reinterpreted through the artist’s multimedia approach and entered into dialogue with contrasting visions of Saturn from myth and astrology.

The notion of the raw or uncalibrated is an underlying thread, from the rawness of techno-scientific objective measurement to the rawness of mythological, visceral, artistic expression.

Saturn was once the star of melancholy, that blend of sadness, introspection, and a sense of longing or yearning. Uncalibrated revisits the interplay between the planet’s symbolic resonance and the notion of melancholy as a complex human condition.