NTAA22 FINALIST: Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves - Martian Sun Series

Just as the impressionists went into the fields to capture natural light, with Martian Sun series, the artist embraces the landscape through a “tele-vision” (distant gazing) process.

It’s an invitation to contemplate an extraterrestrial horizon, a distant landscape, located thousands of millions of kilometers away. Depicting the topography of major sites on the planet Mars, bas-reliefs are illuminated according to the height of the sun on five Martian sites based on prediction from the LMD Mars Climate Database Project.

Besides that a film was made of a sunset on Mars in homage to seminal electronic composer Éliane Radigue (b.1932). Her immersive installation based on images of the Red Planet taken by NASA probes shows the sun setting for about an hour. The Martian landscape realized by Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves goes through different phases of colour, depicting skies progressively turning from orange to blue and into twilight – the reverse of what happens on Earth with a blue sky becoming red.