Continuing through October 11, 2025

Leñador.
Córtame la sombra.
Líbrame del suplicio
De verme sin toronjas.

(Woodcutter.
Cut my shadow from me.
Free me from the torment
of seeing myself without fruit.)

— Federico García Lorca, from “Song of the Barren Orange Tree”

Shadows haunt the rooms in “Viaje a la luna” (“Journey to the Moon”), a moving and evocative exhibition curated by Diego Villalobos and Rodrigo Ortiz Monasterio. We are invited to consider a shadow not only as the indication of a body as it obstructs the path of light, but also in its many poetic implications — the ominous, the apparitional, the unknown, and the evidence of existence. 

The show was conceived after an experience with a ghost, leading Ortiz Monasterio to the story of the unfinished titular film based on a screenplay by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. Emerging from this history, the exhibition extends into the present, placing the work of thirteen historical and contemporary artists into a multifaceted ensemble. It resonates overall with the power of imagination, openness, and the operation of the poetic as a force against oppression, homogenization, and the breakdown of human connection.

Lorca, who was gay and a vocal advocate for social justice, was kidnapped and murdered by Franco’s Nationalist army in 1936 at the age of 38. His death was the likely reason for the abandonment of the film, which was later burned in a fire, leaving us only the surrealist script and a handful of photographs from the set. It is from this absence of the poet and his project that the curators built their show. The timing of the opening eerily coincided with ramped up ICE raids across the nation and stories disturbingly reminiscent of Lorca’s death and the many other histories (and ongoing reports) involving state-sanctioned violence, masked gunmen in uniforms tearing children from parents, and the disappearing of dissidents from their homes.

Situated as the exhibition is in the Wattis and Novak galleries, many of the walls are lined with floor-to-ceiling pleated white curtains, akin to entering a poetic realm that is both theatrical and evocative of a hotel interior. This conjuring of the fictive and the sublime places us at the intersection of a mundane reality and inventive possibility. 

The story each work tells often infiltrates — or as the curators term it, “contaminates” — that of another. Villalobos writes that the underlying concept is a form of “speculative fiction,” which imbues the exhibition with both fantasy and poignancy. In an immersive installation by Álvaro Urbano, a symbolic crime scene is presented in a room littered with pomegranates and feathers. A projection of light defines the silhouette of a window angled from the floor onto the wall. Its uncanny effect convinces us, however briefly, that a window is admitting light from outside. But in the process of identifying the opening, we instead find a gun-like projector hanging from the ceiling. The projection is in fact a recreation of Lorca’s own bedroom window, perhaps the last he saw of his home. The pomegranates number 38, Lorca’s age at the time of his death. On one wall are two drawings by the poet himself. 

Lorca’s drawings evoke a direct human touch, and their juxtaposition with the illusionism of Urbano’s work enhances the feeling of the deceased poet’s physical presence. A surrealist face with vacant eyes weeping moon shaped tears, paired with Urbano’s environment, feels more prescient than reflective, as though the poet’s murder has yet to occur.

If you enter the room at the right moment, Lorca’s tortured faces confront you, accompanied by the mournful sound of Henry Purcell’s “Plaint (O, let me forever weep)” wafting in from down the hall where hang the embodied shadows of machines transformed into starlike abstractions in Emilio Amero’s photograms. A story plays out in a feature-length film by Rosalind Nashashibi. The film is set to repeat, without start times, so you are most likely entering and exiting somewhere in the middle of this complex work that explores human connection and non-linear time. 

Through the hand-held intimacy of home video that features the artist, her children and friends, the storylines move in and out of sync. The characters explore the question, “Can stories survive in space?” Nashashibi’s film references paintings, museum interiors, poetry, science fiction, and a psychic reading, all in search of an answer. Can stories survive in space? Can we love outside of time? Not, as her film suggests, in the realm of telecommunication, teleportation, or other technological innovations which scramble communication and bodily fluids, enabling us only to coexist without the touch and scent of each other. But through art’s ability to communicate our humanity across the ages, perhaps the ghosts can live. 

There are other stories, reverberant and unresolved. In Francesco Pedraglio’s “Autobiography of a Museum,” narratives arise as graffiti scratched directly into the walls, exposing thin layers of exhibition history in the form of keys: those to the gallery and to the artist’s bike; the keys to access, to safety, to possibility, to imprisonment. All are revealing of the bigger picture. 

Additional drawings made by excision and repetition include Ajit Chauhan’s collection of erased postcards, which pair past with present in a literal and metaphorical web of interdependence. Two versions of the same image of text also appear in Danh Vo’s “Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias” and “Untitled,” whose words are quoted from a poem by Lorca marking the time of death of the poet’s friend. One is drawn by hand in graphite by the artist’s father. The other, an echo across both galleries, is a silkscreen copy of the drawing made several years later. It is a work about the repetition of words and atrocities, within the intimacy of families and across the breadth of time and cultures. 

In Nina Canell’s “Tectonic Tender,” a steely motorized conveyor steadily shakes a glass plate upon which detritus (including a beer cap and a cigarette butt) quiver in shallow water. ‘The party is over,’ they seem to be repeating. But where, it implies, did everyone go?

Look up and you’ll see a photograph displayed not as a physical print but rather as a projection onto the folds of a curtained wall. It is one of three images, taken by the Mexican artist Lola Álvarez Bravo, which constitute the only work in the show directly related to Lorca’s lost film. Like the contents in Canell’s glass plate, one image shows long-lost props and the shoes of a man and a woman, but not the people who wore them. Through a strange mix of proximity and ineffability, its depiction as light on an unstable surface seems to emphasize the inaccessibility of the history to which it refers. It is also a story of the woman behind the lens: a brilliant artist who refused to be overshadowed by the suffocation of marriage and the gendered expectations of her time.

Throughout the exhibition, the story in one work is taken up and rewritten by another. All point to themselves, to each other, and beyond. Urbano’s angled light invokes the oft-quoted Emily Dickinson line that aptly describes the creative endeavor: “Tell the truth/ but tell it slant…” Unlike scientific and spiritual traditions that associate truth with direct light, “Viaje a la Luna” gazes into the shadows. In those shadows is the reflected light, which, like moonlight, is indirect and revelatory, a subduing of the blinding light of the sun. Here, art becomes a salve for the deep cut of unrealized possibility. With the experience of loss, with the presence of absence, we realize what we are missing, and what alternative story we might write.