In a curious 1959 treatise, Carl Jung mused on the “psychological reality” of the flying saucer, a phenomenon whose postwar prevalence he speculated was the formulation, in real time, of a “living myth.” Rather than discredit the material possibility of close encounters of the third kind, Jung sought to understand these escalating sightings as integral to humanity’s search for stability amidst the chaos of a modernizing world. Onto UFOs, Jung theorized, we project an expectation of salvation—not necessarily from all global woes but at least from our futile efforts to decipher the universe’s mysteries.
In the galleries of the Drawing Center, curator Olivia Shao takes up the Jungian mantle, conceiving of UFOs as vessels for psychological projection rather than vehicles for galaxy-hopping. Across two floors, Shao refuses to dismiss outright the experience of otherworldly phenomena as mass pathology or optical sleight, instead figuring the UFO as metaphor, assembling nearly forty works to bolster this conjecture. By expanding the category of UFO to encompass projections of “collective anxiety, spiritual longing, and speculative belief,” the exhibition suggestively conflates the technoscientific with the mystical, arguing that human destiny may be as productively understood through esoteric prophecy as through empirical laws of physics.
To illustrate this relationship between the rational and the arcane, the works oscillate between diagrammatic attempts to render mathematical the fantastical and abstracted depictions of metaphysics that defy demystification. Opening the show is Alexandru Chira’s Installation for Invoking Rain and Rainbow - Colorful Project (1986), a drawing of a machine reminiscent of an anthroposophic opera house. Nearby, Howardena Pindell’s Astronomy: Northern Hemisphere (August–September 1997) (2000-01) depicts clusters of numbered white dots against a gray wash. Understood as celestial bodies, many of these acrylic specks are ascribed an arrow, tracing witnessed movement, with the sea of arrows broken occasionally by complex algebraic formulae—hypothetical machinations undergirding the opera of the night skies. More overtly diagrammatic are Stephen Willats’s Travelling with the Good Connector (2019)—in which the artist’s training in cybernetics informs a mapping of watercolored entities that transgress dimensions of spacetime—and Shusaku Arakawa’s Study for Moral / Volumes / Verbing / The / Unmind (1977), a paean to semiotics in the form of overlapping two-point perspective drawings of geometric solids.
If these works also showcase the perils of attempting to map paranormal phenomena squarely onto our rational conceptual systems, then less literal works examine the tendency to project sincere belief systems onto cosmic unknowns. Here, these works are as often produced by trained artists as they are by those serving as conduits for more-than-human forces. Adam Putnam’s postcard-sized resplendent abstractions arrive as dispatches from some sort of stellar nativity: in Visualization #174 (2021–22), a light blue firmament gives way to luminous orbs triangulating against an opaque void, while Visualization #59 (2021–22) conjoins geometric forms via what may as well be an umbilical cord fashioned into the vague profile of a human head.
Paulina Peavy has constructed a divine cosmology of multicolored fractals, here represented by the ink-and-marker drawing Untitled (1960s–early 1970s). Among the most poignant works are two vision drawings, one attributed to He Nupa Wanica (Joseph No Two Horns), dated 1920, and the other to Arapaho artist B Henderson, dated 1880. In the former, an outlined hand—bespeckled with black dots, some circled in magenta, and teal crosses—fills the colored-pencil composition, while the latter combines two lined pages that show a supernatural ungulate, lasers beaming from its eyes, hooves, and tail toward a person—enveloped in a cloak, floating in the blank landscape—and a radiating sun, half obscured by horizon line. Such vision drawings were meant to illustrate journeys—via trance, meditation, or dreams—into realms beyond waking perception.
René Magritte’s eponymous Voice of Space (1931) commands its own wall at the show’s midpoint. As the celestial body around which the exhibition’s constellation revolves, the work foregrounds a theme that counterbalances the chasm between empiricism and mysticism: harmonics. Over Magritte’s pastoral oil-on-canvas scene loom three foreboding orbs, an imposing nod to Pythagoras’s music of the spheres. Trisha Donnelly’s Untitled (Bells) (2007), a nearly two-minute soundscape layering a soothing tintinnabulation, resounds throughout the gallery. If the exhibition’s subtitle conjures that which we might perceive visually, then its title points to that which we might become more productively attuned. This is underscored as much by the inclusion of works on paper by artists with robust sonic practices—such as John Zorn, with the demure No Title (2024)—as by Isa Genzken’s more explicit Weltempfänger Daniel (World Receiver) (1990). On a pedestal rests a cast concrete block, punctuated at its top by antennae and embedded in its center with two perforated pieces of circular mesh. Appearing like the detritus of a sci-fi-themed nightclub, the work seems pregnant with received transmissions, idly waiting to begin its broadcast.