The North Carolina Museum of Art and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina launched the nation's most ambitious contemporary art exhibition celebrating the centennial of powered flight. Defying Gravity: Contemporary Art and Flight presents approximately 91 major works and several special commissions derived from the interaction between aviation and the imagination and exploring the human desire to fly.

The exhibition is part of the year-long celebration Into the Blue, which continues through the close of the exhibition on March 7, 2004. Into the Blue includes special flight-related events, including concerts, films, family events, workshops, lectures and more.

Works included in Defying Gravity were created during the last quarter of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st, and span a diverse range of styles, approaches and media, including painting, sculpture, installations, photography, video and film. Artists featured in the show range from American masters Jonathan Borofsky, Roger Brown, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella and Wayne Thiebaud to international art figures such as Alighiero Boetti, Andreas Gursky, Malcolm Morley and Panamarenko, and to young masters and emerging artists including Lawrence Gipe, Margot Gran, Vera Lutter and Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison. Also featured are several artists with North Carolina connections, such as Brent Cole, Kara Hammond, Marvin Jensen and Michael A. Salter.

While straightforward imagery of the airplane is represented in the show, the exhibition also investigates aviation's wide-ranging symbolic implications. For instance, a plane can be a source of anxiety and fear, as revealed in such works as Exploding Plane by Heide Fasnacht and a modern-day Saint Sebastian—an airman whose body is pierced by airplanes rather than arrows—by the late Michael Richards, an artist killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center. It can also triumphantly be a symbol for creativity and transcendence, as in Rosemary Laing's color photographs of an effervescent human figure, reveling in being airborne as seen in the picture above.

Man's personal desire to fly is also explored with a video of a self-propelled flight over Greenland by Simone Aaberg Kærn and works by Jamaica-born Albert Chong and North Carolina resident Hoss Haley, who were each inspired by the myth of Icarus and Daedalus.

Flight's effect on artistic perspective can be detected in aerial views such as Ed Ruscha's maplike painting of Los Angeles streets and in the video component of Brent Cole's installation, which simulates flight by taking viewers on a virtual journey through the Museum, out the door and around the grounds. And equally engaging perspectives can be found at airports themselves: striking, large color photographs taken from inside airport terminals by the Swiss team of Peter Fischli and David Weiss will be joined by John Schabel's photographs, taken from the tarmac, of passengers seen through plane porthole windows and by Leo Rubinfien's views of passengers taken aloft.

Additionally, several artists use actual airplane parts and materials to create art, including Donald Lipski, who draws materials from the salvage yard of Grumman Aero-space Corporation, and Mark Newson, who uses the aluminum and rivets more commonly associated with a fuselage to construct futuristic furniture. And Chilean Eugenio Dittborn uses the airplane in a much different manner—folding each of his paintings to fit into an envelope and sending them around the world via airmail, a practice he began in the mid-1980s to circumvent the censorship of the Augusto Pinochet regime and the resulting cultural boycott. Two paintings, each with its envelope detailing the work's itinerary, will be on view.

The Museum has commissioned several pieces specifically for the exhibition. Inside the galleries, Boston-based collaborators Ralph Helmick and Stuart Schechter are creating what they call three-dimensional kinetic "sculpture" consisting of 1,800 small Mylar butterflies, suspended from the Museum's three-story ceiling, that coalesce to form a X-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet with a 17-foot wingspan. Outdoor installations include Bill and Mary Buchen's Flight Wind Reeds, kinetic sound sculptures inspired by aerial stunts performed by Russian fighter jets, and Chris Drury's Chamber for the Trees and Sky, a large camera obscura constructed with stone walls and a log roof within the Museum Preserve. To view photo essays of these installations, click here.

An exhibition catalogue reproduces in color every work in the exhibition and includes essays by exhibition co-curators Huston Paschal and Linda Johnson Dougherty, scholar Anne Goodyear and cultural historian Robert Wohl.

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Credits
John Schabel, American, born 1957; lives New York
Untitled (Passenger #12), 1994-97
Toned gelatin-silver print, 23 1/4 x 19 1/4 (59.1 x 48.9)
Courtesy the artist and Paul Morris Gallery, New York

Photo Credits: Rosemary Laing, Australian, born 1959; lives Sydney
flight research #3, 1999
Chromogenic print, 46 1/2 x 46 1/2 (118 x 188)
Courtesy Gitte Weise Gallery, Sydney

Margot Gran, Israeli and American, born United States; 1967; lives Kiryato-Ono, Israel
Planes, 1996
Oil on canvas, 59 x 59 (150 x 150)
Collection of the artist