Continuing through August 23, 2025
In celestial mechanics, a LaGrange point is a moving point in space in which the gravitational forces exerted by large orbiting bodies on smaller orbiting ones, which exert a relatively minor centrifugal force, are equalized. The three-body problem arose when scientists attempted to predict the motion of the moon as acted upon by the sun and the earth. In 1772 the Franco-Italian mathematician, physicist and astronomer Joseph-Louis LaGrange, whose prodigious intellectual curiosity extended to a study of the exact amount of work he could do before becoming exhausted, solved the problem. The five mathematically determined LaGrange points for each dynamic three-body system make excellent locations for satellites.
In the context of this group exhibition on the theme of extraterrestrial contacts, the LaGrange points symbolize a point of temporary equilibrium.
Speaking of astronomy, the curatorial collective that assembled this show, Ninth Planet, composed of DB Amorin, Whit Forrester, and Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, formed in 2023 during congressional hearings on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). The curators see the mission of Ninth Planet — referring to Pluto, the rock and ice “dwarf planet” at the edge of our solar system — as expanding consciousness about extraterrestrial contacts, well beyond the fantasy-ridden alien invasion tropes of bellicose 1950s science fiction. They see themselves as “wrest[ing] the narrative away from military, governmental and corporate ownership … to explore thresholds and transitions of power, knowledge and perception in relation to UAP and broader ideas around non-human knowledge.”
Are we correct to assume that beings wielding superior technology to ours also possess ethics superior to ours? Given America’s current paranoia-ridden mistreatment of the undocumented immigrants who do the jobs we spurn, a shift toward cautious optimism seems in order. The work on display here, from six emerging artists or artist teams — Crystal Cortez/Asa Nakagawa, Santino Gonzales, Suzanne Kite, mario lemafa, Bogosi Sekhukhini, and Wendi Yan — approaches the close-encounters theme in a spirit of experimentation and exploration, without angelic or demonic preconceptions.
Cortez/Nakagawa’s 6-channel sound installation “Mysticete FM” juxtaposes recordings of eerily beautiful humpback whale songs — popularized by an LP in the 1970s, when they were first discovered, and in the 1986 “Star Trek IV” movie, set in San Francisco — with the less ethereal waterborne sounds of human industry, industry that endangers not only cetaceans but, since everything is connected, potentially all terrestrial life.
Santino Gonzales’ “Psychokinetic Earthenware” series draws on the ceramics tradition of his native New Mexico as well as the state’s history of extraterrestrial trial activity. His small handmade artifacts suggest models of objects observed and remembered, as if they possessed magical advanced technology. The technology, however, is anything but advanced: a saucer, a portable radio, a bus seat, a speaker cone, a transmission tower. Gonzales’ “Faded Discs” is a large AM-FM portable 1970s-era radio that plays (thanks to the magic of digital audio) over 200 hours of radio broadcasts about UFO encounters gleaned from the archives of Wendy Connors.
In their surrealist botanical sculpture, “The Last of the Lemurians,” Suzanne Kite and New Red Order image a sex toy made by the vanished Lemurian civilization, once considered to be the inhabitants of sunken Atlantis. The erotic humor parodies the lost-civilization romanticism of colonialist conquerors and the resulting half-serious, half patronizing cultural appropriation of their civilized and christianized — or exterminated — subjects.
The vanished world of fairies and faeries is conjured from the past by mario lemafa, whose “rings” of glitter and nail polish evoke the enchanted circles of magical lore. The five-gallon paint bucket of pastel-inscribed saltines comprising “fairy ‘food’” asks if supernatural beings can be enticed by supermarket snacks rendered inedible.
Bogosi Sekhekhini’s two digital prints, mounted back to back and hung perpendicular to the gallery wall, depict subatomic scientific principles as dark spaces charged by cosmological pyrotechnics. “Sefate sa Bophelo (PP CHAIN)” represents the proton-proton chain, one of two thermonuclear fusion reactions through which stars the size of our sun or smaller convert hydrogen to helium, powering our solar system. In Sekhekhini’s image, six glowing bodies are arranged symmetrically in a V-formation, each representing one phase of the process. “CNO Cycle,” on the reverse side, represents the other hydrogen-helium cycle, composed of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, which operates with stars larger than our sun.
Wendi Yan’s “Mammoth Technology Manifesto” is composed of vinyl lettering affixed to the gallery wall. It celebrates “inquiry that defies linear progression and dominant knowledge paradigms,” “intentional illusion, historical recursion, and epistemologies escaping classification,” and “alternative ways of knowing … burned in soil, practiced in myth, practiced quietly.” Such defiant subjectivity is borne out in the artist’s “Frozen Ink,” seductively illegible writing in cast borosilicate, a kind of Asian or Arabic calligraphy extruded into three dimensions. “Synthesist’s Table” posits a mirrored lab or dissection table as an alchemical laboratory in which biomechanical life is created (or creates itself) from affinities between disparate materials including glass, mirror, coal, tubing, gum rubber, film reel, and vellum.
“Archives of the Impossible” features paranormal imagery from the collections of researchers/archivists Richard Haines and Whitley Streiber, the author of “Communion,” his own extraterrestrial encounter story. Whit Forrester’s “The Electric Universe Theory” is a bicameral circular wall sculpture in gold leaf whose two halves are to be connected electrically (with human mediation) on the closing day of the exhibition.
In our age of frenzied argumentation, the quiet, thoughtful tone of this exhibit, and its openness to interpretation, may be at least temporarily calming. It provides an emotional and critical LaGrange point that harks back to an enchanted folkloric past and envisions a transformative science-fiction future.
