In ‘The Sky Below,’ Artists Depict Futures Worth Sticking Around For

If some of the world’s richest men had their way, we’d think the future was all shiny silver surfaces and rockets blasting off to space. It’s a difficult vision to buck, especially when so much media bolsters it: movies keep putting ordinary men into space suits and tasking them with saving our dying planet. (Starring Ryan Gosling, out next March!)

But there’s another mode of science fiction, one that has distinctly West Coast roots. This strain of speculation looks inward and down — to the earth — for a more promising future. It’s this approach, put forth by sci-fi authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler, that ties together the works in The Sky Below, a group show curated by Heidi Rabben for the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art.

In a former office building on San Rafael’s Fifth Avenue, the museum occupies one high-ceilinged main space and four former offices, two of which are turned over to single-artist displays for this show. Walls are painted lavender and royal blue, and a pedestal supporting a small Maria A. Guzmán Capron sculpture is a glowing goldenrod.

The speculative futures depicted here are colorful, in more ways than one. Astria Suparak’s video On the Neon Horizon continues the artist’s investigation into mainstream white filmmakers’ depictions of “Asian futures, without Asians.” Here, we get an eight-minute supercut of Asian languages and cultures flattened into dangerous, crowded and miasmic backgrounds, again and again. Clips from the 1930s to the 2010s show this is neither a new, nor a diminishing trend.

Other artists invent their own narratives, whole cloth. Actually, cloth is a recurring material in The Sky Below. Capron’s two other pieces in the show are hand-dyed and screen-printed textile works, hanging like declaratory banners on either side of the museum’s entrance. Multi-faced and multi-limbed bodies entwine in colorful patchworks of tie-dye. Whatever future they’re ushering in, it looks uncontainably optimistic.

Opposite these works, Soleé Darrell’s Portal is a looser, draped arrangement of sumptuously painted velvet, rope and trims, splayed across that lavender wall like a rainbow-hued pelt.

In a former office, rel robinson’s installation is a bit more muted, palette-wise; curtains of found fabrics in white, light pink and cream hang over the walls. Their soft folds form the background for two quilted textile pieces, each containing even more layering — of photographs, AI renderings, language and stitching — that speak to the complex web of images and influences that shape contemporary femininity.

Even a work that doesn’t initially read as a textile is, in fact, made from repurposed bedsheets, T-shirts and other fabric remnants. Julia Goodman’s two handmade paper reliefs show the pattern of the brick wall they were formed against. Bits of brick and dirt still cling to their surfaces. Hanging side by side like door-shaped portals, they cast green and orange glows against the wall behind.

The exhibition’s three other artists look both forward and back to craft their work. On the museum’s largest wall (the blue one), six large-scale paintings by Ranu Mukherjee depict disorienting scenes of humans, animals and plant life. In their confusion, these are lush, vibrant versions of the surrealist artist René Magritte’s 1965 painting The Blank Signature.

The Sky Below, unlike so many future-minded shows, only has three video pieces in it. Sofía Córdova uses the medium to mine the Indigenous and 20th-century cultural history of San José. If No Clouds, Then Stars, and Then the Cosmos combines references to Lick Observatory, the organizing of the High Tech Gays, the Delano grape strike and the 1985 killing of a Black teenager, Melvin Truss, by a San José police officer. The video essay, which is an ongoing project, looks at the history of the land, the technology that has shaped it, and the people who have been touched, often violently, by that technology.

Possibly the most far-out (and spacey) of all the works in the show is Genevieve Quick’s video Cel Bell, which imagines a telecom network that connects ancestors to an increasingly intergalactic Asian diaspora. “Your ancestors would like to know what your life is like,” the video proclaims, linking the history of San Francisco’s Chinese Telephone Exchange to Quick’s imagined “Celadonians” — futuristic beings from Planet Celadon.

In addition to swirls of color, satisfying textures and deeply researched narrative threads, The Sky Below boasts a reading room, complete with a vending machine from the Oakland bookstore Sistah Scifi. Each artist has recommended at least one work of science or speculative fiction, and Rabben and Mukherjee will both lead reading group meetings in August.

The futures imagined in this show — rooted in beauty, craft, handmade materials, care for land and people — are far more appealing (to me, at least) than the sterile, space-bound one I grew up believing in. It may take longer to see such visions enter our mainstream media, but until then, there’s a heck of a reading list to start with.

‘The Sky Below’ is on view at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (1210 Fifth Ave., San Rafael) is on view through Sept. 21, 2025.