Tis Michalous (65)

Tis Michalous (Greece)
Space Shuttle Mission: STS - 134
http://www.michalous.com

MICHALOUS' statement

Between mountains and clouds meeting each other, nearby a lake changing colors every day, this is the place visual artist Ioannis MICHALOU(di)S has chosen to have his atelier/lab. This first cloud-hunter follows Centaurs’ and Nymphs’ footprints, lies in wait of air streams, grapping pieces of sky… shaping them, molding them, creating “images of forms” and baptizing them as aer( )sculptures¹.

99,9% air and 0,1% glass is the composition of every aer( )sculpture. In Space Technology, this same composition is named silica aerogel. This immaterial material is the lightest solid on planet Earth –with three Guinness Prizes- and is used also by NASA as an excellent heat insulator for spacecrafts and for stardust collection, http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/stardust/photo/aerogel.html

MICHALOU(di)S is the first visual artist worldwide bringing this ethereal material in Art, choosing to hunt with it skies and dreams.

Despite the fact that the space technology required for the creation of the aer( )sculptures costs inevitably a lot in time and money, the results are always amazing: weightless sculptures having the ability to hover or float opening, this way, new paths towards a Space Art era where the light and immaterial opens a dialog or replace the heavy and voluminous.

Each aer( )sculpture is -at the same time- a “ready made” but also a masterpiece. And that because the inner world of every aer( )sculpture is different thanks to the microcosmos seen throughout the sculpture: airy clouds, fragments of gold, orbits of planets creating “spaces in between”. Light and shadow is one more dialogue opened when a light beam transpierces each blue aer( )sculpture projecting their transparent goldhue shadow in orbit.

If humans are (organic) carbon based representations then every aer( )sculpture is an (inorganic) silica based representation. We know that silica -the natural glass, other than the chemical silicone- is a basic component for the industrial fabrication of data storage devices for computers, cf. Silicon Valley, CA. If we accept now the hypothesis that one day silica will be the Bank of all human memory then we can surely say that every aer( )sculpture travels also as a Memory Ark².

Past, Present and Future are melted together into an unknown infinity where Space and Time become Logos.

Into an endless beginning…

1. A legend says that these “non hand made” aer( )sculptures made out of pieces of sky had caused the ozone’s hole phenomenon !?…

2.Another legend wants the aer( )sculptures to be transferred by spacecrafts to other planets in order to be used for a sky cloning project.