They Flew to Planet Nova
kate werble gallery
December 2019 - January 2020
They Flew to Planet Nova maps a psychogeography of the Northern Virginia suburbs, a region shaped by its technology, national security, and defense companies. Drawing upon Northern Virginia’s McMansion mishmash of Neocolonial architectural styles, columns and edifices are shown in a skewed perspective.
Their banality belies the concentration of imperial power at the heart of the Washington, D.C. data center market. Titled after Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly, a collection of 24 black American folktales, these works consider where mythology—social and cultural, institutional and colonial, corporeal and psychological—might be stored and found.
