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The Independent previews NASA | ART

Art of the cosmos lands at the FAC and unveils a creative look at exploration … the Colorado Springs Independent previews NASA ART by Edie Adelstein. Here’s an excerpt from the preview related to Monica Petty Aiello’s contribution to the theme.

Monica Petty Aiello: Frozen Inferno is a series of 25 works — all but two of which were created just for NASA Art — studying the surfaces of the extreme moons. Petty Aiello, a Denver artist, works with paint, yarn, resin, water and ink to build layers of landscape.

From a distance, her works look like flat abstracts; they may suggest a sunlit, lily-pad-topped pond (Io), or life forms under a microscope (Europa). But upon closer inspection, the depth in each work reveals itself as an impossibly detailed artistic rendering of an alien expanse.

“Images from NASA’s Galileo and Voyager missions — still striking years later — provide Petty Aiello’s starting point …

“The actual geology of the place inspires the development of new painting techniques to emulate it,” she says, adding, “I actually get all these spacecraft images and sit down with scientific specialists and deconstruct the geology, and then I try and come up with painting techniques to interpret that.”

“Petty Aiello’s experimental working method illustrates the way creativity and curiosity fuel both the sciences and art.”