About the artist:

Not the movie director. In the summer of '69 when Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldren and Michael collins took their "giant step for mankind" and touched down on the moon, my grandmother, confronted with this news, said, "Pshaw, they didn't do any such-a thing." She accused the people on television and "those scalawags in Washington" of contriving a new scheme to get her money. My grandmother didn't have any money. At least she didn't have much. She owned some land, red clay that she called farm land in the hills of North Carolina. So no one paid much attention to her reasons for not believing that man had landed on the moon. We were concerned that her mind was slipping. She was 76, smart and vehemently independent. More than one housekeeper had been curly told, when my mother and father's backs were turned, to leae and not to come back. She had outlived her husband by 33 years and was still active in the church and in the kitchen. But she refused to believe even while lookig at the pictures in Life Magazine, that man was really walking on the moon. Although she never saw the movie when "Capricorn" was released in 1978 having a moon landing hoax as its theme, my grandmother's belief, or rather her disbelief, was verified. She is 90 now and still going strong. But she did not want to talk about moon walking, TV pictures and other such nonsense "I've got to drive up to the farm, don'tchar know, and see how Mitt and Willy are doin' with the cotton. It's been a long dry spell." In the fall of '84 my grandmother died she was 96. My father was sitting by her bed in the last hours of her life when she opened her eyes and said, "Hop up here, Bill, and drive this thing. I can't drive and see at th same time. If you take the wheel then I can point out all the people and places as we go by." She closed her eyes and my father took the wheel. All afternoon, without ever leving her bed, they cruised around the red-clay hills of her childhood. Although she could never see the men who landed on the moon, on the day of her last trip to the farmw ith her eyes closed tightly she saw everyone she ever knew. Today, with advanced imaging technology, we have extended our eyes to the outer reaches of space and turned them inward to the vessels of the heart. But we continue to see, as Gran'ma did, in the light of our own interest, our personal experiences and our most precious beliefs. - John Waters from the Visual Chemistry Booklet