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.
