Against Outer Space at the Beall Center for Art + Technology

Sarah Rosalena, CMB RBG (2021). Glass beads, gourds, pine sap, beeswax, Cosmic Microwave Background visualization, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and UCI Beall Center for Art and Technology. Photo: Yubo Dong.

Cultural narratives around outer space often hew curiously close to the colonial past: the fantasy of an open frontier, ready to offer up its resources to an intrepid explorer. In the absence of living beings, we imagine its empty space as a blank canvas, which might be inscribed with any number of possible futures.

To walk through the galleries of Against Outer Space at the Beall Center for Art + Technology at UC Irvine was to be briefly taken in by this fantasy. Circling one’s sense of direction and gravity was disrupted by the alien contours of works suspended across the walls and ceiling. But while the exhibiting artists contend with cosmological subjects, their practices are rooted in the earthly origins of their mediums: Mica, dried gourds, and charcoal-coated clay all appeared among the works on display. Across an array of works that showcased the agency and affirmed the dormant histories of each artist’s chosen material, Against Outer Space critiqued conceptions of outer space as a passive site of potential extraction. It imagined instead technologies that might operate in tandem with their materials, drawing on past and future forms of knowledge to envision new modes of existing in relation to natural resources. It proposed kinship with non-living materials, honoring their capacity to contain knowledge and confound our sensory worlds.

Entering the gallery space, one passed through the illuminated orbit of Marcus Zúñiga’s photosphere (2025), a work commissioned for this exhibition that felt less like a sculpture than a portal. Sitting within a singular alcove, a fragment of densely-layered, gleaming white mica was suspended at eye level within a double-sided pyramid of wooden and acrylic cubes. From within its wooden scaffold, the mineral centerpiece fractured the spotlights surrounding it to cast a kaleidoscopic grid of light across the enclosing walls.

Mica remakes the world in its own image. The same atomic structure that forms its layers also endows it with birefringence, the capacity to sever rays of light into separate, radiant beams. The material’s framing within a tiered pyramid conjures its ancestral applications within Mesoamerican architectural structures, a history that spans from Teotihuacán to Copan.¹ But the work’s staging also complicates its status as an artifact to examine: The sculpture inverts the anthropological hierarchies of the vitrine, which encloses a prized object in a clear cube, by balancing its crystalline centerpiece in a pine scaffold, positioned not to be inspected but to transmit light. To examine the work is to be ensconced by it, as you turn outward to watch the contours of your own body move through the surrounding illuminated grid. Within the scaffold of Zúñiga’s sculpture, the medium’s transformative power takes precedence over the artist’s intervention. The work’s dazzling refractions trace the contours of our perceptual limits, a ghost remaining in the retinas even as one walks away.

Across the gallery, Sarah Rosalena’s CMB RBG (2021) reframes contemporary imaging technologies within the ancestral forms of her chosen medium. Nestled in interlocking patterns atop a plinth, her sculptures invert the form of Wixárika gourd bowls, their bulbous exteriors embedded with iridescent beads that radiate across their shells like a technicolored lichen. Traditionally, the hollow interior shells were embedded with beeswax and beads were used to form astrological maps, their spherical shape offering prescient insights into the elliptical paths of celestial bodies.²

While these early cartographic artifacts preserved astro-navigational knowledge, Rosalena’s sculptures offer another means of making sense of the cosmos: Her brightly-colored, intricate beadwork reflects a heat map of the early universe in microcosm. Her titular subject, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), is a thermal record of the Big Bang, a faint photonic glow of modulated color that resembles a weather map, invisible to the naked eye but ever-present in empty space. Excerpts from the heat map are translated into Rosalena’s sculptures, every spectral wave corresponding to a glass bead, in a record of an ancient world overlaid on the present. The spherical forms of the gourds, which served as miniature models of the cosmos in Huichol religious practices, are re-inscribed with the contemporary cartography. Her practice of assemblage weaves together traditional and technological modes of seeing, refuting the existence of empty extraterrestrial landscapes by materializing the discovery that every element in the univers with its own atomic history.

Marcus Zúñiga, photosphere (2025). Light, mica, acrylic on ponderosa, 48 × 46 × 46 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and UCI Beall Center for Art and Technology. Photo: Yubo Dong.

If Against Outer Space began with rays of light (Zúñiga’s photosphere), its final gallery was framed by darkness; five blackened pillars make up Alice Wang’s Untitled (2024). Standing at just over five feet, her monoliths carry monumental weight that belies the organic texture of their surfaces, rendered in slabs of sculpted clay, bearing the marks of the artist’s hands. But these impressions are blurred by the coating applied to the pillars, a mixture of charcoal and graphite, two materials with the capacity to absorb light across a uniquely broad spectrum of wavelengths. As a medium, charcoal conjures both the deep time of our earliest cave paintings and the profound ephemerality of its material substance, which coats everything it touches in inky black. Absent of any apparent texture, Wang’s pillars appeared less like physical objects than slices of dark, disorienting space, hovering across the gallery. Rather than casting a singular shadow, their dark forms reflected in the polished floor, furthering their profound sense of dislocation and disorienting the viewer who stood beside them.

Far from an inert canvas, Wang’s chosen medium bends perceptions of space and light. This darkness has a substance, a material weight and history, a sentiment that coursed through the works on display in Against Outer Space. Rather than imagining uninhabited galaxies as empty sites for conquering, these artists animated the transformative potential of non-living natural materials, excavating the pre-colonial histories of their own mediums to subvert otherworldly fantasies of extractive expansion and empire. The vision of the future they conjure is radical not for its technical prowess but for its adherence to ancestral modes of knowledge embedded in their organic materials.

Alice Wang, Untitled (2024). Earthenware, 22 x 25 x 64 inches each. Image courtesy of the artist and Beall Center for Art and Technology. Photo: Yubo Dong.

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