In her first solo museum exhibition in the US, Alice Wang showcases latest prints and glass sculptures, alongside newly-commissioned large-scale ceramic sculptures, a movie, and an artist guide that mirror the artist’s deep curiosity for the area between the true and the imaginary. These works are the results of her immersive analysis journeys to area analogs, or websites with comparable circumstances to extraterrestrial our bodies in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and throughout Iceland and the Arctic.

“By placing myself via the physicality of touring to those surreal and elegant landscapes, I aimed to shift my Earth-bound perspective, open up the edge of my anthropocentric notion, and discover the unknown,” mentioned Wang. “The bodily boundary of the ensuing work shouldn’t be restricted to its seen expression, and indulges our collective curiosity.”

Via sculpture, pictures, and movie, “We Are Extraterrestrial” engages the convergence of science and thriller, the place the recognized encounters the unknown and the place empirical remark confronts the boundaries of human comprehension. Inside an immersive gallery expertise, Wang’s objects function conduits for dialogue, inviting us to ponder the vastness of the pure world and our personal place inside it.

Central to the exhibition lies Wang’s fascination with hexagonal shapes, drawing inspiration from pure geometric formations resembling basalt columns present in distinctive volcanic websites around the globe, in addition to particular molecular buildings resembling carbon and serotonin. To assist facilitate her ceramics manufacturing, Wang collaborated with the Artwork Division at East Los Angeles School, bringing collectively a small crew of scholars, college, and fabricators to create a brand new suite of large-scale ceramic works that experiment with scale and notion, difficult the notion that the bodily boundaries of artwork are confined to its seen expression.

In dialog with these hexagon columns, Wang additionally presents a number of glass items created in collaboration with Los Angeles stained glass studio, Judson Studios. Impressed by the liquid steel mercury, the glass sculptures are exceptionally lustrous, natural in type, and frozen in arrested movement. In distinction to the monolithic and everlasting hexagon columns, glass seems fleeting, transitory, and dynamic.

Additionally on show is Wang’s Pyramids and Parabolas III, a structuralist movie that captures footage from her solo expeditions over the past six years. Wang journeyed to Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Iceland, and the Arctic, searching for landscapes on Earth that resemble these from different planets. The movie, underscored by a soundtrack from the musician Ciel, unfolds as a collection of psychic states. It weaves collectively travelogue vignettes, private anecdotes, and household historical past, presenting the physique as an instrument for exploring each bodily and psychological landscapes, aiming to increase past the boundaries of human comprehension.

Accompanying this visible and sonic journey is an artist’s guide created in collaboration with anthropologist and author Todd Meyers, and revealed by the unbiased publishing studio Sming Sming Books. This guide options photographs from Wang’s intensive travels, complemented by free verse, offering a tangible extension of the movie’s exploration of otherworldly terrains.

The prints included within the exhibition are a part of Wang’s ongoing sculptural follow of utilizing meteorites, a metamorphic materials with a previous life in outer area. On every print, Wang has utilized hand-gilded silver leaf to high-resolution scans of meteorite cross-sections. When transferring across the works, relying on the lighting situation, colours change with the phenomenological impact of the silver, shapeshifting between the true area of the printed object, the indexical impression of the meteorite, and the illusionistic depiction of minerals.

“Usually once we encounter meteorites, they’re fairly small and behind glass in a science heart,” mentioned Wang. “I’m attempting to develop an intimacy with the supplies, in order that guests can each relate aesthetically to those objects in addition to attempt to examine the vital language of this stuff.”

at Vincent Price Art Museum, East Los Angeles College
till August 3, 2024