Continuing through October 4, 2025
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1973)
“The Sky Below” is a heady, philosophical exhibition that feels especially resonant at our current historical moment. Curated by Heidi Rabben, whose research includes feminist science fiction, the show offers a counterpoint to the dystopian landscapes so often imagined in the genre — worlds shaped largely by male fantasies of conquest, control, and escape (the Star Wars franchise comes readily to mind).
Instead, Rabben highlights an alternative narrative where apocalyptic visions of Earth and the cosmos give way to visionary futures in which societies and technologies challenge entrenched patriarchal structures. These speculative worlds, emphasizing interconnection, transformation, and resilience, draw on the legacy of such writers as Mary Shelley, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia Butler. Echoing these writers, the eight participating Bay Area artists — Maria Guzmán Capron, Astria Suparak, Genevieve Quick, Ranu Mukherjee, Sofía Córdova, Rel Robinson, Solee Durell, and Julia Goodman — reimagine history and technology through feminist and ecological lenses. Together, they suggest that the infinite potential so often projected into the cosmos may, in fact, be found beneath our feet and within the subconscious.
Guzmán Capron’s textile sculptures merge human, animal, and celestial forms, dissolving boundaries between material and speculative identities. Suparak’s video and digital collages expose exclusionary tropes in mainstream science fiction, particularly concerning power and the portrayal of Asian cultures as exotic or threatening, and reclaim them through feminist critique. By contrast, Quick casts herself as a time traveler or alien observer in works that recast space exploration as a metaphor for cultural displacement and survival. Her interactive “Hi. This is Mom and Dad” (2019–2024), in which faux scholar’s space rocks light up to play voicemail messages from her parents, draws us into a touching personal orbit.
Mukherjee layers sari cloth, glitter, paint, and story-like fragments into richly colored, non-linear narratives that weave personal memory with cultural and futurist myths. Works such as “Bitter Skin” (2023), “A Place to Find the Light” (2023), “Hush” (2025), and “Tender Monsters” (2023) are hung against a vivid blue wall. They anchor the exhibition with visual richness and emotional depth.
Robinson reimagines the female body as a site of digital-age adaptation. In “femmebot 1.0/gertrude” (2025), she blends filmic images with AI-generated fruit on quilted velvet, a nod to the female robot in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927). Similarly, Goodman transforms worn textiles into handmade paper, repurposing them into new forms that carry memory and labor. Her “Sea of Stories (i)” (2025) is particularly resonant as it includes a scrap of fabric from author Le Guin’s quilting practice, a reminder that transformation begins with the remnants of lived experience.
Durell’s and Guzman Córdova’s works fit less easily within this curatorial framework. Durell’s fabric wall installation “Portal” (2025), with its batik and tie-dye fabrics, evokes 1960s counterculture nostalgia more than speculative vision. Córdova’s “If No Clouds, Then Stars, and Then the Cosmos” (2023–25) ambitiously proposes a “star’s-eye” view of California’s history and topography. However, its mix of video, photographs, and objects suffers from spatial and formal disjunction, diluting its conceptual clarity.
A notable shortcoming of “The Sky Below” is its lack of art historical framing, especially given its thematic resonance with Surrealism. The Spanish painter Remedios Varo’s “The Sky Below” (1958) (also known as “Papilla Estelar (Star Porridge)”) provides a powerful historical precedent. In this work, a woman grinds “star stuff” to feed a caged moon. It’s a haunting metaphor for alienation and fortitude that informs the exhibition’s central proposition: that even in confinement or adversity, imagination fuels transformation.
Like Varo’s painting, most works here remind us that whether gazing outward to the cosmos or inward to the psyche, resilience and creativity remain at the heart of human survival. These artists insist that hope and creativity are not distant stars, but enduring human capacities.
