Extrastellar Evaluations

Contrary to the received wisdom, some inhabitants of the lost continent of Lemuria survived when it sank into the Pacific Ocean thousands of years ago. The nineteenth-century theory of a lost continent might have been abandoned by the scientific community, but a number of recent sightings support an alternative explanation: that the colony of aliens living on Lemuria has made its new base beneath an active volcano in Northern California…

In Extrastellar Evaluations, the infiltration of the surviving Lemurians into human communities—and their attempts to relay information back to their home planet—provides a new means of understanding the turbulent recent histories of art and society. The installation focuses on the 1960s as a turbulent era for both civilizations: as earthlings experienced global political upheavals, the Lemurians suffered a number of severe weather events that disturbed their channels of communication. This prompted their representatives on Earth to construct a series of “minimalist” and “conceptual” artworks—many of them visible from space—to broadcast their news across the stars.

Drawing from astrology, mysticism, and sacred geometries, Extrastellar Evaluations reappraises human history through the lens of an alien intelligence and reframes systemic violence as a kind of cosmological dissonance. By seeing our culture through the eyes of a distant other, this multimedia installation offers one way of reflecting on the destructive impulses of human life on earth and the contemporary crises they have engendered.