Review: Inner Orbit

The artists in Inner Orbit see our tendency to think about the small-scale implications of outer space as an opportunity for further exploration—not into the workings of the cosmos necessarily, but into the details that make up our world here on Earth. Andrew Yang’s two-channel video, Interviews with the Milky Way, features the artist’s friend Jeff, an astrophysicist, and his mother Ellen, a child psychologist. The subjects relate personal stories about the Milky Way, which Yang pairs with archival video and film footage of both celestial and terrestrial scenes that evoke outer space. Prompted by her son, Ellen Yang offers anecdotes about breastfeeding him, and their brief conversation leads finally to death and the afterlife as she muses, “I used to think of the afterlife as us being put back in the universe. That’s enough, right?” Her rhetorical question echoes the ideas in Matthew Mullins’s painting The Sun in Our Bones, which includes black paint made from burnt cow bones, forging a literal connection between the calcium and phosphorus that exist both in our own bones and in stars. READ MORE.