Continuing to September 14, 2026
Before the advent of public museums at the end of the 18th century, private collectors amassed their acquisitions into what were called Kunstkammers and Wunderkammers. The former housed works of art, while the other, literally called “chamber of wonders,” usually contained unusual specimens from the natural world, ingenious mechanical objects, or “tribal artifacts” of the type that would later be ensconced in archeological or anthropological museums.
For 250 years, these categories of collection have persisted and mutated within durable institutional and pedagogical frameworks. They are distinguished by their different display etiquettes: art museums emphasize a worshipful regard for the viewer and the objects displayed therein, while natural history and archeological museums tend to see their holdings as amalgamations of specimens exemplifying mysterious, and sometimes fictitious, taxonomies.
These display etiquettes are made visible (and subtly mocked) in an installation titled “A Roadmap to Stardust,” by OortCloud X (Neil Forrest and John Roloff). Even the room containing this assortment of 12 odd objects is constructed to resemble a burial chamber containing grave goods, that is, attribute-laden objects placed near ceremonially buried corpses. Think of the Tomb of Tutankhamun, with its antechamber of royal objects, or the famous terra cotta warriors discovered in China in 1974, originally part of the tomb of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang.
“A Roadmap to Stardust” plays on the kind of archeological romance that finds new knowledge in forlorn forms, even if that new knowledge is speculative rather than actual. If an idealized future is no longer a fashionable topic of contemplation, maybe the imaginary past can still be. Even now, as we transit from the end of the Anthropocene era to something that might be called the Cybercene era, we can look back with perplexed wonder at the early emergence of the Anthropocene from the earlier Holocene age. “A Roadmap to Stardust” brings us back to that moment of wonder by inviting us to contemplate an alchemical dialog between the earthly base material and the gold of celestial aspiration.
The key to the exhibition lies in two works that lie on the floor. One is titled “Stardust Cistern” (2024), an organized pile of stacked mud fragments that look as if they were the smashed shards of very large terra cotta jars, all positioned against a panoramic photograph of a desolate landscape. The other, “Stardust Telescope I” (2024), is an interlaced tubular form made primarily from intertwined terra cotta vessels that resemble ancient amphorae reassembled into a complex liquid storage system pulling double-duty as a primitive telescope. There you have it — raw mud and cooked ceramics, casting clay as the ancient fulcrum between nature and culture, containing and preserving precious fluids while reaching for the stars. Roloff was trained as a geologist prior to becoming a ceramic sculptor, so distinctions between unformed mud and intentionally formed clay would be very much in his wheelhouse.
“A Roadmap to Stardust” contains ample written material detailing the astronomical and cosmological interests shared by several ancient cultures, most notably that of ancient Sumer, signs of which echo throughout the exhibition. To one side of the gallery are two terra cotta amphorae, both elongated, one emblazoned with cuneiform inscriptions. The other has small areas of thick, lustrous glazing that contrast with the rough terracotta.
On the floor is another hybrid object, “Enkido’s Map I,” the terracotta head of a crocodile sporting spiraling decorations on either side of its toothsome jaw. The body of the crocodile is represented by a life-sized color photograph, a nod to the Egyptian god Sobek, a deity associated with chaos and self-protection. Another terra cotta object, titled “Origin Device I,” (2024), is the most perplexing work in the exhibition. Taking the form of six spheres connected to a seventh, it is also the most centrally positioned piece. It seems vaguely functional, rather like a navigational device, with each of the outer clay spheres bespeaking slightly different organizations of their respective surfaces, lending new resonance to the phrase “as above, so below.”
