There is something extraordinarily captivating about the unknown. The planet Mars was a pristine otherworldly mystery not long ago, but our presence there, even via rovers, takes away a good bit of the magic. Our quest for knowledge leads us to explore and document greater swathes of the planet leaving less and less up to the imagination. There seems to be no alien life, certainly nothing along the lines of War of the Worlds – Mars may indeed be a chunk of dead rock spinning alone in space. It is interesting, though, that in order to prove that alien life does not exist on the red planet, life alien to it had to make its own fresh tracks in the sand.

When I think about living on Mars, the idea captures the allure of the frontier – of looking out for miles and of seeing nothing but undisturbed landscape. There are few places like this on Earth, where one can feel completely alone. The prints Super Mars and Beehive Mars each show a single figure on the planet – as if he or she owns the whole rusty world. It is both a triumphant accomplishment and a profoundly isolating lifestyle. These characters sport the Sputnik-chic aesthetic of the 1950s and 1960s in bright poster colors, referencing the styles of the space age and their separation from the home world of today by a profoundly isolating expanse of space and time