Kevin Sudeith is a contemporary artist with exceptional foresight. Sudeith is working in what is perhaps the most archival artistic medium available to humankind: stone carving. Petroglyphs, to be exact. Our achievements are awesome, notes Sudeith, but where is the proof? Rusted Model-T’s and piles of corrupted hard drives might fail to convince. Even the architecture of our most celebrated cities is temporary, compared to solid rock dating from the Upper Cretaceous.
Sudeith is doing what he can to address this problem of modernity by taking a year on the road to make engravings on rock faces and boulders across the country. The gold-leafed carving here is four miles west of Ingomar, Montana, in the Kanta Hills. The carving is in the hard cap rock on top of soft sandstone rim rocks. The stone on which the Chandra orbiting observatory is carved is in a shallow gully that opens into a bigger canyon and drops down to the fields below. It is readily accessible by a private road, which is open to public—which means there’s sure to be more than a few puzzled hikers making snapshots next to the curious modern petroglyph. Sudeith: “My interest in the Chandra began with the naming contest, delay, and finally its deployment. Its images continue to be brilliant. Since the Chandra exists at the limit of our understanding of nature, perhaps carving a pictograph of it is similar to the carvings of the ancients—perhaps showing the game they hunted or symbolizing their beliefs.”
Image courtesy Kevin Sudeith/Petroglyphist.com
November 16th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ron Simon and World Amazing Things, Maggie. Maggie said: The Space Age Enters the Stone Age | Visual Science: Kevin Sudeith is a contemporary artist with exceptional fo… http://bit.ly/buQKqW [...]
November 16th, 2010 at 2:45 pm
If only we could chisel how to construct an observatory or a hard drive into the rock…
November 17th, 2010 at 1:18 am
Why not have a Mars lander do one on that planet to say we were there. Kilroy was here!
November 17th, 2010 at 3:31 pm
This is awesome. Very nice! I wonder how big it is.
November 18th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Sheryl, The solar array is about 17 inches across, and the optical bench is about 16 inches long.
November 18th, 2010 at 5:41 pm
I put together a post of some other space age petroglyphs that I’ve carved around the US:
http://petroglyphist.com/?p=163
November 19th, 2010 at 12:14 pm
This has got to be one of the coolest things I have ever seen! Unbelievable! Kevin Sudeith should receive a genius grant!
November 19th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Great work. Will stand the test of time in way that few artists can even contemplate, let alone create.
March 17th, 2011 at 1:17 am
[...] compliment Rebecca Horne’s post at the Visual Science Blog at Discover Magazine here is an array of other space petroglyphs I’ve made around the country. Below are two [...]
September 19th, 2011 at 9:54 pm
Imagine being a random hiker who happens upon this stone carving, after watching a discovery channel special on crop circles!….lol