ARTNET NEWS
Is Anybody Out There?
A New Show Interrogates Earthlings’ Obsession With Extraterrestrials
6 artists bring their visions of alien life to Sun Valley Museum of Art.
Richard Whiddington, October 8, 2023
”…It’s a fact that resonated with Courtney Gilbert, the curator at the Sun Valley Museum of Art (SVMoA) in the Rocky Mountains city of Ketchum. The result is “Sightings,” an exhibition set to run through December 2, in which 6 artists explore how the pandemic revived our fascination with the night sky and the possibility of extraterrestrial life lurking somewhere in the great beyond.
The show’s title is borrowed from Seattle-based artist Cable Griffith’s 2015 paintings. These reworked hand-drawn reports of unidentified aerial phenomena into scenes from 19th-century landscape paintings. At SVMoA’s prompting, Griffith has revisited the series, now framing his scenes with darkened windows that recall the confinement of the pandemic’s stay-at-home orders…”