The Santa Fe New Mexican from Santa Fe, New Mexico • Page Z038

ART OF SPACE architecture Paul Weideman Art of outer space Connie Samaras has a strong and diverse resume in photography, including work in the United Arab Emirates and at the South Pole. A recent project in southern New Mexico was an especially powerful experience. For her Spaceport America series, she focused on the construction of the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport at a remote site in Sierra County. "I photographed it in three visits over the span of a year, beginning in August 2010," she told Pasatiempo in a conversation from her home in Los Angeles. "One of the ways I framed things was to emphasize the sky and the Earth, and that we're already on a planet.

I wanted to go a bit against the grain of corporate-architecture photography. Part of the reason was to bring out the idea of the imaginary." Her newest photos are featured in the exhibit Past, Present, Future: Michael Berman, David Taylor, and Connie Samaras at the New Mexico Museum of Art, opening on Friday, Oct. 28. Berman shows work from a long study of the grasslands of the Chihuahuan Desert, and Taylor exhibits his photos of border monuments along the U.S. -Mexico boundary Born in Albuquerque, Samaras is an art professor at the University of California, Irvine.

The project on which she is currently engaged is Edge of Twilight. "I'm looking at other kinds of future imaginaries. I'm shooting at a large lesbian retirement community in an RV park in the desert. I'm interested in looking at the future as a series of possibilities and how people are organizing ergonomically. I'm going to use that and other gay communities as backdrops for a kind of lesbian time-travel video.

It will be scripted and will be based on oral histories from some of the people I've talked to and on 70s lesbian manifestoes and apocalyptic youth literature." That's a leap from the Spaceport America documentation and from her previous project, in which she photographed fantastic Middle East buildings financed with oil revenues. "Except for a few of the buildings in Dubai, the really stellar, high-end architecture is being done in Abu Dhabi," she said. "To me a lot of the architecture in Dubai is very simplistic. There are a few stunning buildings, but for the most part it looks like a CAD-designed backdrop for a '60s sci-fi film about an apocalyptic future. And that's one of my interests from growing up in New Mexico." The state's austere landscape combined with the often-secret science ongoing at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories yielded a psychic reality in which "the place of imagination becomes very large," as she put it.

Photographing the spaceport, a design by the English firm Foster Partners, was a singular experience. "I was struck by how brilliant the design is, from the different angles. For me, it was really about how it relates to the landscape." She mentioned a photograph she took that shows a black road going up to the terminal that "looks like a nestled UFO against the mountains." Spaceport America incorporates a terminal and hangar facility, a space operations center, and a runway. Associate architects on the project were URS Corporation, San Francisco, and SMPC Architects, Albuquerque. SMPC's work includes Los Alamos National Bank branches in Los Alamos and Santa Fe, Isotopes Baseball Park, and an adaptive-reuse project for Zane Bennett Contemporary Art in Santa Fe.

The Spaceport building has a very distinctive, flowing shape that sits low in the desertlike landscape of the site 30 miles southeast of Truth or Consequences. Viewed from the historic El Camino Real trail, the organic form of the terminal resembles a rise in the landscape, according to a Foster Partners statement about the project. It is a green building, using a minimum of carbon-dependent construction materials and methods and with an energy-efficient design. It is expected to continued on Page 40 Hgn jf Connie Samaras: Air Fire Rescue Facility, Back Up Mission Control, 12. 2010 Dome Construction, Air Fire Rescue Facility, 7.

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