All bound

August 1 – October 12, 2017
Planet Labs, Low Earth Orbit (LEO)

“Gribble‘s art is restless, moving from dioramas painstakingly assembled from found materials, to a sprawling network of miniature painted snapshots, to filaments of spider silk arranged to echo urban streetscapes. Despite the diversity of media, her work maintains a continuity of theme, a sense of place, and a reverence for our home planet.”

— Robert Simmon, Lead Data Visualizer at NASA

Planet Labs is a private Earth-imaging company based in San Francisco, CA. The company designs and manufactures Cubesat satellites called Doves that are then delivered into orbit as secondary payloads on other rocket launch missions. Each Dove is equipped with a high-powered telescope and camera programmed to capture different swaths of Earth. Each Dove continuously scans Earth sending data once it passes over a ground station. Together, Doves form a satellite constellation that provides a complete image of Earth once per day.

Artist Richelle Gribble was invited to be a Planet Ambassador with access to Planet Explorer Beta, an online mapping service driven by data from Dove satellites. She created site-specific installations in the office headquarters including a modular puzzle containing 350 hand-painted pieces, seven 3D mixed media constructions of satellite imagery, and etched artworks onto the outside panels of four Dove satellites. Her artwork was launched to outer space aboard an Orbital-ATK Minotaur-C rocket destined for a Sun synchronous orbit, the first-ever orbiting art show on satellites.