Claremont, CA—The Benton Museum of Art is pleased to announce the Fall 2024 exhibition Open Sky, which will run from August 14, 2024 to January 5, 2025. The Benton’s contribution to PST ART: Art & Science Collide, organized by Getty, Open Sky features the work of contemporary artists who are using the uniquely California materials of light and space to investigate our place in the wider universe. This practice draws on the legacy of Pomona alumnus James Turrell and his Dividing the Light, a centerpiece of the college’s art collection and the only public Sky Space in Southern California. Organized by guest curator Kris Kuramitsu, Open Sky presents work by Xin Liu, Agnieszka Polska, and Marcus Zúñiga, as well as two performances by Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade.
“The artists in Open Sky collectively provoke us to reconsider perception, embodiment, and our place in the universe,” said Victoria Sancho Lobis, Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the museum. “Through different materials and formats, they challenge the boundaries of empirical evidence and mystical experience. We are delighted by this opportunity to renew our dedication to the interpretation of the Light and Space movement, including its varied impact on artists of successive generations.”
The five artists in this exhibition fluidly engage scientific, cultural, and artistic languages—robotics, physics, virtual reality, Mesoamerican spiritual practices, and more—to express what it means to be human at this seemingly precarious moment. Forging new frameworks that recalibrate relative scales of time and space, Open Sky unfolds as a series of propositions for reconsidering relations between earth and sky, and our position as subjects between them.
Xin Liu (b. 1991, Xinjiang, China, lives and works in New York/London) has long engaged in the fertile territory between visual arts and engineering in her multimedia projects. For Open Sky, Liu's rockets and satellites are human surrogates among the stars, intimately intertwining the celestial and terrestrial. The White Stone (2021), a film tracing the search for rocket debris through Chinese villages, remote deserts, and the depths of the ocean, leads us from land to sky and back again. Sculptures fashioned from fallen rocket debris—Debris–Maple Leaves and Debris II, both from 2021—memorialize these bodies fallen from space, containing multiple transformations within them. In Seeing through the Eyes of Gods, You have mistaken yourself for him, a newly commissioned installation combining satellite imagery and neon text, Liu meditates on the presumed authority of vision and the radical shift of perspective that comes when earth and space change places.
The videos of Agnieszka Polska (b. 1985, Warsaw, Poland, lives and works in Berlin) are seductive and meditative, deftly using sound and image to bring viewers into a state of altered relationship with the narrative and, ultimately, the world around them. Her animations, digital collages of images, text, and sound from the internet and beyond elicit visceral and emotional responses. Here, The Happiest Thought (2019) is titled after Albert Einstein’s description of the moment when he understood the relativity of the gravitational field, noting that a man falling off a roof would not feel his own weight as he fell. Polska’s installation brings its viewers, reclining and staring at a ceiling projection with a hypnotic soundtrack, into a state of experiential free-fall in which scales of time and space are simultaneous and stretched relative only to our experience of the work. Her projection takes visitors as far back as the prehistoric moment just before the earth’s largest mass extinction in the Triassic period. Through narration and digital animation, visitors experience this moment of blissful florescence of life on the brink of disaster. The Happiest Thought is presented at the Benton with two additional works: The New Sun (2017) and What the Sun Has Seen (2019).
Marcus Zúñiga (b. 1990, Silver City, NM, lives and works in Los Angeles) weaves cross-cultural notions of the cosmos into installations that are grounded in the viewer’s embodied experience of light and space. His installations integrate Mesoamerican ideas about the universe, family history and spiritual practices, and references to quantum astronomy to create a physical experience of what the artist terms a “multicultural cosmic perception.” For Open Sky, Zúñiga connects the concepts undergirding the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the curandero’s space limpia (the healer’s space-clearing), and the cosmic locator concept in a “seeing environment” that uses light, mirrors, lenses, and prisms to interact with viewers’ bodies. By creating this shifting and reactive observatory, the artist centers the subjectivity of the environment itself as a gesture toward spiritual healing. He is represented in this exhibition with Emplacement (2023) and Seeing Environment (2024).
Open Sky also features two performances by Malik Gaines and Alexandre Segade with live vocalists and musicians. Their Moon Mine is a newly commissioned site-specific song cycle charting the journey of two people heading to the moon for different reasons. The performances will take place in October 2024–on dates to be announced—during the sunset evening program at James Turrell’s Dividing the Light at 鶹Ӱ, blocks from the Benton Museum of Art.
About the Curator
Kris Kuramitsu is an independent curator and educator in Los Angeles. As Senior Curator at The Mistake Room in Los Angeles, she organized exhibitions such as Matsumi Kanemitsu: Metamorphic Effects (2014); Cao Fei: Shadow Plays (2015); A Tender Spot: Sky Hopinka and Karrabing Film Collective (2018); and Gaëlle Choisne: Temple of Love – ADORABLE (2019), among others. She curates the annual Candlewood Arts Festival, a program of temporary public art projects in the Anza Borrego Desert for the Under the Sun Foundation. Additionally, she has organized exhibitions for institutions such as LAXART, Los Angeles; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California; Instituto Cervantes, Madrid; Paramo, Guadalajara; and the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, among others. She has taught at Harvey Mudd College and was the 2022 curatorial resident at Occidental College, where she organized the exhibition Voice a Wild Dream: Moments in Asian American Art and Activism, 1968–2022. She is the recipient of the 2024 Call to Dream Sam Francis Fellowship and will be a resident at Tokyo Arts and Space this fall.
About PST ART
Open Sky is among more than 60 exhibitions and programs presented as part of PST ART. Returning in September 2024 with its latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this landmark regional event explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art.