Osculating Orbit, constructed from laser cut stainless steel, that sit somewhere proximate to scientific models in their concise fusion of figuration and abstraction. Here the delirious orbits of space debris are cast as elliptical planes encircling vertical limbs. Despite the luster of their finish these elegant metallic forms are imbued with a certain melancholy. They haunt the space with the memory of Vladimir Tatlin’s unbuilt Monument to the Third International, that emblem of Modernity’s unfulfilled social promise and its imagined but unrealized futures. Jakobsen’s sculptures here give pause for reflection on the lapsed promise of modernist futures and the social and environmental ‘externalities’ baked into them. These diagrammatic aluminum totems counsel against the rush to make modernity great again with an infusion of resources harvested in space. Like sentinels guarding against capitalism’s drive to find an outer-spatial fix in a final, free- market frontier for the very planetary environmental crisis it has provoked, they hold out the prospect of a relationship to outer space not governed by familiar lethal compulsions.

Osculating Orbit (III), 2021

Mirror polished stainless steel

173 x 100 x 90 cm