Jane D. Marsching’s photographic panorama, para: flight, space, envelops the viewer with historical and contemporary images of flight: star-filled skies, unidentified flying objects, science fiction stills, shooting beams of color and light, rockets, insects, the moon, and outer space, all starting from a jumping off point inspired by the human desire to fly and the Wright brothers’ first experimental flights. As she describes her work, “The narrative starts with what it is like to be on earth and long to and ultimately try to fly. And it ends with attempting to imagine what it is like to be in space and to be flying and looking around you. In between the images try to address a historical to futuristic, science to science fiction, ordinary to fantastical, real to illusory line between physical and visual impossibilities and discoveries relating to the science, effort, and facts of flight.”
Marsching creates a transitory and shifting magical world of images, where the borders between fact and fiction start to blur, and the universal dreams and desires to fly and escape the confines of gravity are captured in photographic images veiled by illusion and representation.

--Linda Dougherty

from the catalog to an exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Flight, Defying Gravity, 2003