The Celestial Mechanic

Regier’s The Celestial Mechanic, one of the newest pieces in the Ulrich's Martin H. Bush Outdoor Sculpture Collection, asks many tantalizing questions and provides few direct answers. It cracks our imaginations open and urges us to imagine the scenarios that led a cumbersome space suit to slowly decompose under a glass membrane here in Wichita.

The sculpture’s title is the one clue the viewer has. It evokes the work of the mind — celestial mechanics is a centuries-old branch of astronomy that deals with the movement of objects in space. Indeed, the piece was informed by Randy Regier’s extensive reading [https://randyregier.com/reading-matters/] of books on science, history, philosophy, and science fiction, a genre that combines insights from all those disciplines. Most directly, the piece was inspired by “Fallen Spaceman,” a short story by Australian science fiction writer Lee Harding originally published in 1971. In the story, a human spaceman, clad in an enormous suit that almost succeeds in saving his life, falls out of the sky onto an Earth-like planet populated by an agrarian society. The text narrates the event from the perspective of both Mattaro, the victim of what for him is a routine industrial accident, and the humans below, who witness his fall as an awe-inspiring and portentous event.

The sculpture’s title also evokes the labor of the hands. This is fitting since Regier’s skills as a sculptor borrow from his years of work in auto body shops. Inspired by the metal hard suits engineered in the early years of space exploration, Regier, whose family has deep roots in Kansas, scoured antique shops all across the state to find the materials for this sculpture. He then painstakingly transformed an odd assortment of objects ranging from an old jukebox and refrigerator to lamps and cooking pans into a vision of the shell that might remain after a creature from space passes away.

The Celestial Mechanic suggests that humanity’s centuries-old dream of space depends in equal parts on flights of imagination and the ability to engineer the most minute of details. These are good reasons why it belongs on a university campus more than any other place. It also belongs here because it inspires so many hard questions with no clear answers. Some deal with the past: How do we make meaning of the limited material remains of bygone events? Some deal with the distant future: What and why are we as a species willing to sacrifice for the ability to leave our home planet? Some are questions most of us encounter unconsciously on a daily basis — how do we relate, for example, to the detritus of obsolete technologies all around us? The world is full of things that at one point represented our greatest cultural aspirations and now fill up the trash heap of history, not to mention our actual landfills. Regier’s celestial mechanic stays mum on these and many other questions, but her silent presence can continue to inspire each of us to try and puzzle out our own answers.