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Through simple materials charged with enchantment, lemafa conjures a world just beyond reach. These works allude to unseen intelligences persistent in folklore and faith: fairies and liminal beings who defy documentation yet remain real to believers.

With fairy ‘food’, a pastel-inscribed cracker becomes a summoning device, intentionally inedible for humans and repurposed as offering. Could belief statistically increase the chance of an encounter? Might these delicate traps signal not just invitation, but mourning? A lament for what no longer lingers: fairies once imagined in woods, wetlands, and hidden corners—now displaced like countless species, their habitats paved over, food sources vanished, and presence rendered impossible.

In rings, glinting circles of glitter nail polish evoke spellwork and resonance with entities moving between dimensions. lemafa’s practice transcends the binaries of believer and skeptic, creating spaces where desire, memory, and myth function as valid data. These works offer no proof, only possibility—tracing outlines of vanished beings and worlds we once accommodated.

Cortez and Nakagawa create an immersive sonic environment bridging human perception with humpback whales’ intricate vocalizations. This multi-channel installation captures and reinterprets these complex songs, highlighting the sophisticated communication methods of these marine mammals.

The work showcases whale songs’ beauty while calling attention to increasing noise intrusions—ship engines, military sonar, industrial activities—into marine habitats. These human-made sounds disrupt natural acoustic environments, threatening whale communication and overall ecosystem health.

By juxtaposing humpback whales’ melodies against human-generated noise, Mysticete FM emphasizes the urgent need for quieter oceans and greater respect for non-human intelligences. In tuning into these submerged frequencies, Mysticete FM calls attention to the fragility—and persistence—of communication systems beyond our own.

Gonzales’s ceramic works seem to emerge from the artist’s birthplace in New Mexico—a region long recognized as a nexus for unexplained phenomena. Working with clay, he develops a personal vocabulary challenging institutional narratives around otherworldly intelligence by grounding them in lived experiences and regional folklore.

Each vessel—Saucer, Loopers, Volcanico, Radio, Orb, Bus Seat, Speaker Cone, Powerline, and A Winged Vessel for Seeds—functions as both artifact and communication device, connecting the terrestrial with the cosmic. The earthenware’s tactile presence roots these unusual forms in local tradition, invoking centuries-old Southwestern material practices while suggesting interstellar possibilities.

Gonzales positions alien encounters not as threats requiring militarization, but as elements of personal cosmology shaped by place and memory. The Radio and Powerline pieces reflect human outreach attempts—connection technologies seeking contact across vast distances.

By crafting these symbols in clay—earth itself—Gonzales dissolves the boundary between extraterrestrial and familiar, encouraging approaches through wonder rather than conquest.

Installed back-to-back, these prints expand Sekhukhuni’s exploration of interstellar “intelligence” through the nuclear principles of stars. Together, they map invisible physics powering the sun and, by extension, all life on Earth.

The CNO cycle, an actual process of stellar nucleosynthesis, transforms hydrogen into helium using carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen as catalysts. Its companion, the proton-proton chain, generates most of our sun’s energy—dual engines of stellar alchemy shaping not only stars, but ourselves.

Sekhukhuni translates these cycles into graphic forms, interweaving scientific fact with visual syntax. What intelligences might exist in these elemental conversions? What communications are encoded in fusion, decay, and light?

These pieces approach science as a language still becoming comprehensible. The sun’s warmth becomes a form of contact, a transmission, a relationship. We are made of stardust, yes—and perhaps remain in conversation with stars.

Suspended in vacuum-sealed pods, this work contains living matter older than oxygen itself. Sekhukhuni collaborates with Rhodopseudomonas palustris—a purple photosynthetic bacterium predating our atmosphere. This organism thrives in low-oxygen conditions, metabolizes light or chemical energy, and adapts its feeding modes to the environment, demonstrating adaptability beyond human capability.

The work imagines futures where human life may not persist, but life continues. It presents resilience at the microbial level—species flourishing not despite planetary transformation but because of it. These bacteria reference an earlier “Purple Earth” while suggesting a possible earth to come.

Contrasting technocratic fantasies of controlled gardens, Pearl of San Francisco manifests the anti-garden: a realm of prehistory and post-human possibility, where survival belongs to the marginal, the anaerobic, and the invisible. Perhaps the aliens we imagine already exist here—microscopic, ancient, and quietly reshaping conditions for life’s evolution.

Artist and co-founder of the Ninth Planet collective Whit Forrester offers a work that resonates with the energetic signature of this exhibition. The Electric Universe Theory is a living circuit of speculative kinship and connective force. A material and conceptual portal, the piece uses electricity—an animating principle of both cosmic and biological life—to invite viewers into a shared field of coherence.

Referencing a cosmology that privileges electric interaction over gravitational pull, the work reorients our attention away from distant, militarized skies and toward the intimate frequencies that reside within and between bodies. Gold leaf acts as a conductor and offering, while the heartbeat rhythm of the TENS unit references the physiological and the sacred. Created on an eclipse, and with reference to the astrological alignments of its creation embedded subtly into the surface, this is an object to be decoded and a transmission to be experienced.

As part of Lagrange Point, Ninth Planet acknowledges our own formation as a collective, born of encounter rather than doctrine or defense. This artwork serves as both signal and stance: that consciousness emerges, that divinity exists within rather than externally, and that unmapped territories invite relation rather than surveillance.

The Electric Universe Theory will be activated by the artist at the closing reception on August 23.

Mammoth Technology Manifesto reads like a communication from a forgotten future. The text advocates for technological inquiry that defies linear progression and dominant knowledge paradigms. Mammoth Technology embraces esoteric progress: celebrating intentional illusion, historical recursion, and epistemologies escaping classification.

This transcends retrofuturism or speculative fiction, representing something more disruptive—an ontological rift, a subtle glitch in history and science’s interface. Like a biosignature concealed in metaphor, the manifesto asserts that alternative ways of knowing have always existed—buried in soil, embedded in myth, practiced quietly.

In Lagrange Point, where the gravitational influences of empire, industry, and institutional science encounter resistance, this work provides a framework for technology that predates and outlasts modernity. Its presence feels simultaneously archival, prophetic, and elusive: seeking resonance from those attuned to its frequency. Where progress typically suggests forward motion, this work bends time sideways—what exists just beyond sanctioned boundaries of knowledge?

Synthesist’s Table presents an experimental workstation from a parallel epistemology—where knowledge emerges through intimacy, balance, and heat rather than extraction or measurement. Tubes and vessels suggest a laboratory where instruments become organ-like, and understanding operates metabolically rather than mechanically.

Glass balances on mirrors, anchored by coal—suggesting elemental transformation and fugitive energy. Film and vellum evoke records that resist fixed interpretation.

This installation alludes to alternative forms of awareness that communicate without language or code, but through chemistry, vibration, and gradual becoming. If extraterrestrial life exists, perhaps its methods of synthesis more closely resemble alchemy than algorithm?
Here, the laboratory transforms into a body—and the body becomes a site of speculation.

In Frozen Ink, language appears neither fixed nor fossilized—but suspended. Cast in borosilicate glass, the work envisions text as a paused organism captured mid-movement, caught between fluidity and form. Delicate sculptural traces evoke tentacles, antennae, or attempts at contact—language transformed into something biological, semi-sentient, and speculative.

Yan draws inspiration from Stanisław Lem’s His Master’s Voice, where scientists attempt to decode an extraterrestrial signal. As meaning dissolves into rhythm, and analysis shifts toward abstraction, language’s fundamental nature comes into question. In response, Yan offers transformation rather than translation—linguistic creatures too alive to read, too unfamiliar to decipher.

Trained in scientific history and versed in synthetic ecologies, Yan reimagines the aesthetics of scientific progress. Frozen Ink functions as an unconventional biosignature resisting standard classification. It proposes that recognizing unfamiliar life might require an entirely different form of literacy—one that reads meaning in physical form rather than decipherable symbols.

The Inner Carbon Classic unfolds in a future where breath functions as technology. Drawing from Daoist inner alchemy, planetary ecology, and speculative gameplay, this animated sequence reveals fragments of a puzzle-based scripture: a digital realm where personal respiration connects to Earth’s carbon cycles.

Yan envisions geoengineering operating meditatively rather than extractively—transformation originating not in atmospheric factories, but in circulatory feedback between bodies and biospheres. Anchored in the Neijing Tu, a classical Daoist body-as-landscape diagram, this work recontextualizes planetary crisis as a spiritual alignment problem, proposing gameplay as ritual recalibration.

This work suggests extraordinary intelligence might emerge not from distant stars, but from reconfigured attention, scale, and relation. Yan’s cosmotechnic practice integrates spirit with system, body with environment—not as a nostalgic return to nature, but as a practice of perceiving ourselves as inseparable from the ecological systems we inhabit.

Housed at Rice University’s Woodson Research Center, the Archives of the Impossible preserves documentation of UFOs, alien encounters, psychic phenomena, and other contested realities beyond conventional understanding. Founded by scholar Jeffrey Kripal, this collection safeguards the lifework of UFOlogists, experiencers, and researchers, including NASA-affiliated scientist Dr. Richard Haines. Dr. Haines co-founded NARCAP (National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena) in 2000 to provide aviation professionals a credible platform for reporting technically inexplicable aerial phenomena.

The materials presented here from Haines’ collection include photographs and handwritten correspondence—testimonies submitted by individuals driven to document the anomalous. These artifacts anchor the exhibition in phenomenological evidence: light was seen, recorded, reflected by something whose behavior defies conventional explanation. What emerges is not a conclusion, but a pattern—not proof, but a persistent murmur: a collective chorus of accounts that resist institutional dismissal and invite contemplation of what exists beyond established frameworks of knowledge.

Whitley Strieber’s Communion (1987) and The Visitors (1994) transformed public discourse around alien contact. His accounts—widely read, debated, dismissed—opened a channel. Following publication, Strieber and his late partner Anne received thousands of letters, sketches, and firsthand accounts from other experiencers. The Strieber Collection, preserved within Rice University’s Archives of the Impossible, houses these correspondences: intimate, often hand-drawn testimonies from individuals struggling to articulate the ineffable. This selection of illustrations, meticulously compiled by Rice University scholar Amanda Nedham, comprises a growing visual codex of encounters with non-human intelligences.

These images are not assertions of truth but invitations to contemplate our collective unknown. Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup writes, “the absurdity lies not in the reports of anomalous experience, but in the dogma that refuses to accommodate them.” Here, absurdity becomes a signal. The strangeness of these narratives may resist scientific taxonomy—but their uncanny similarities, emotional depth, and continued accumulation represent a legitimate territory of human experience that exists beyond the boundaries of institutional acknowledgment.

In The Last of the Lemurians, Kite, as part of the New Red Order collective, reimagines mythical Lemurians—beings of ancient wisdom from the lost continent of Lemuria—as commentary on settler colonial desires. This sculptural piece presents a Lemurian sex object, blending humor with critique of Indigenous narrative appropriation.

Lemuria, originating in 19th-century pseudo-scientific theories and later adopted by occult traditions, has been romanticized as a utopian civilization. Kite and New Red Order subvert this narrative, highlighting how such myths have served colonial fantasies and obscured Indigenous histories. By creating a Lemurian sex toy, the work satirizes the fetishization of the ‘exotic’ and challenges viewers to examine how colonialism continues shaping perceptions of the ‘Other.’

The work offers a crucial reminder of Indigenous perspectives’ importance, prompting questions about the origins of consumed myths and the ethical implications of their perpetuation.

In an exhibition critiquing dominant portrayals of unidentified aerial phenomena and otherworldly entities, Kite (Oglala Lakota) provides an alternative approach to the enigmatic. She reads from her eponymously titled paper, contrasting American settler-colonial fear of the unknown with Lakota understanding of stars and cosmos as relations rather than threats.

Kite argues that settler narratives position the enigmatic—whether extraterrestrial or terrestrial—as something to conquer or fear, reinforcing settler innocence and supremacy. In distinction, Lakota cosmology regards the ambiguous or mysterious as sacred, integral to life, knowledge, and balance. The cosmos becomes a network of relationships rather than a frontier of danger.

Kite’s work challenges us to examine the ethical foundations of competing worldviews: where settler perspectives frame the unknown through fear and control, Lakota understanding embraces these phenomena as relatives within a larger cosmic family. This shift invites us to approach the unexplained not with defensive force, but with the same care and humility we might extend to kin.

Faded Discs is a collection of radio broadcasts about the UFO phenomenon. Spanning more than 40 years and 200 hours of recordings, this show is a tribute to the work of independent researcher Wendy Connors, who originally shared these recordings on CD-ROMs from her homemade website. “Faded Discs” aired on Wave Farm’s WGXC from August 2021 through February 2023.

In Variations on a Beam, Gonzales assembles fragments from his personal UFO Magazine collection, creating a tactile homage to pre-internet ufology. Through curated images and texts, the work captures an era when beliefs around extraterrestrial phenomena formed through analog media and grassroots communities.

This piece honors Earth-bound expressions of curiosity and the cultural artifacts that have historically shaped our understanding of the unsanctioned.

Gonzales renders the desert landscape as simultaneously familiar and uncanny. A perfect earth cut-out rises and falls above its extraction site, creating visual dialogue between absence and presence. The monochromatic blue rendering transforms the scene into something both illustrated and dreamlike.

Unlike governmental frameworks that characterize unexplained phenomena as threats requiring containment, Gonzales intimates that the landscape itself harbors secrets resisting categorization. The work suggests extraordinary elements exist within ordinary settings, inviting viewers to consider how perspective shifts might reveal new understandings of place and phenomena eluding official explanation.