Digital collage, 2019
"Earth and Jerry" is a re-edited version of a photo taken by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990, after the prime mission under NASA's command. Our planet, Earth appears in the photo as less than a few pixels. This photo later influenced the publishing of the book Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagen.
By only copying and pasting the image of Earth in the photo, my aim was to create a work of art by altering a minimal amount of information from a photo that we don’t usually consider as art in the context of “art history”. However, its embedded value holds more importance to the history of humankind than a great percentile of art in the canon. By altering the image and placing it in an art context, my intention is to prompt questions pertaining to our valuation of art as it affects the continuity of art history. Naming it “Earth and Jerry” is my way of trying to solve the problem of the inability of perceiving a parallel universe from our existing technology.
Here is a quote from Carl Sagen in his book Pale Blue Dot published in 1994,
"Look again at that dot, That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there -- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.