Join us for an evening of sights and sounds celebrating the closing of to take root among the stars.

Sounds:
Tino Gonzales
Good Blanket
Future Twin (solo)

Sights:
tamara porras
Amy Lange

...to take root among the stars brings together eleven California-based artists with works that contemplate the relationships between humanity on Earth and in the cosmos. Can looking towards the universe mean anything other than the abandonment of Earth? How might imagining a future elsewhere in the galaxy ground us in the present?

Photograms by Kija Lucas and Vanessa Marsh construct a terrestrial visuality of skies and constellations through a cameraless process that utilizes earthly materials, accessing a collective visual imaginary of space. Alice Wang and tamara suarez porras use archival photographs of space that consider how the hand and body can physically interact with the celestial. Further notions of the body as it exists in relation to land and space are present in Dionne Lee’s video utilizing arranged layers of collected imagery, Becca Imrich’s backlit photographs of skin rearranged as maps that recall topographies of Mars, and Amy Lange’s crocheted textiles that evoke images collected by spacecraft. Sculptural gestures with paper by Lindsay Tunkl and Amy Tavern consider proximity, at once felt and imagined, across time, space, and sky. The possibilities of existing ephemera are explored in works by Vivian Sming and Aspen Mays: Sming from pages of philosophical texts and Mays from a collection of astronomical photographs found in Chile’s National Observatory.

The exhibition, curated by tamara suarez porras, draws its title and framework from Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, which raises questions of how humans might envision their impact in the present when forming visions of the future.