Mariner 9: Laing Art Gallery

Mariner 9, a giant panoramic vision of the planet Mars created by Canadian artist Kelly Richardson, is returning to the North East after an international tour to exhibition venues including the 37th Toronto International Film Festival (Canada), Albright-Knox Art Gallery (USA) and Natural History Museum Vienna (Austria). Commissioned by Newcastles Tyneside Cinema, the piece will go on show at the Laing Art Gallery from 10 May 2014. It premiered in 2012 at Whitley Bays Spanish City Dome where it attracted more than 10,000 people. Created using NASA's own data, Mariner 9 shows Mars and is set 200 years in the future. The planet's landscape is littered with the rusting remains of real and imagined spacecraft with some of them still showing signs of life - flickering, moving and transmitting data back to Earth where possibly there is no one left to receive it. The artist worked with imagery and technical data from NASA, combining it with Terragen, a complex scenery generation software used by the film and gaming industries, to create an uber-realistic red planet, minutely replicating its distinctive geology and weather patterns. Uniquely at the Laing Art Gallery, visitors will have the chance to see Mariner 9 alongside dramatic paintings by John Martin, a key influence on Kellys work, and traditional landscapes by JMW Turner and John Constable in Turner & Constable: Sketching From Nature which is on show until 29 June 2014. For Turner and Constable in the 18^th century, painting in the open air was as new and exciting as Kellys use of cutting edge digital technology today. By bringing together these works, created 200 years apart, the Laing Art Gallery is inviting the public make new connections between these artists and setting Mariner 9 in an exciting new and thought-provoking context. Canadian-born Richardson, who lives and works in Whitley Bay, draws on science-fiction cinema, literature and the history of landscape painting in works that interweave fine art, animation, real footage of spectacular natural wildernesses and Hollywood special effects to create immersive works that are realised over several months and sometimes years. She has shown work in Beijing, Gwangju and Busan biennales, the Sundance film festivals of 2009 and 2011 and has exhibited in major museums in the USA and Canada including the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; Albright-Knox Gallery and Museum, Buffalo; and the Musée dart contemporain de Montreal and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Mariner 9 is on show at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle from 10 May until 7 September 2014. Admission is free. Mariner 9 was commissioned by Tyneside Cinema, supported using public funding by Arts Council England. The exhibition is supported by Art AV.