You are browsing an archived site for a previous Northern Spark event. To visit the current site click here.

You are browsing an archived site for a previous Northern Spark event. To visit the current site click here.


Margaret Pezalla-Granlund, Extramundane

Burnet Gallery at Le Meridien Chambers

Extramundane

“The less the life there proves a counterpart of our earthly state of things, the more it
fires fancy and piques inquiry as to what it is.”
—Percival Lowell, Mars and Its Canals, 1906

Margaret Pezalla-Granlund’s exhibition Extramundane will explore the imaginative and expressive potential of modeling speculative landscapes: those unexplored places beyond what we can see, the places beyond our everyday world, the extramundane.

The American astronomer Percival Lowell popularized the theory of the Martian Canals through his books, including Mars and Its Canals, in which he imagines the citizens of the dying planet working in harmony to engineer a system of planet-wide canals to carry water from the shrinking polar ice caps. Today, one hundred years after Lowell was widely discredited, amateur scientists still scrutinize images of Mars for evidence of an advanced civilization. We are inspired and moved by our desire to discover something extraordinary. What if we could see beneath the surface of Mars? What if we could model the wondrous things just beyond our ability to see?