Dario Robleto: The Signal highlights the artist’s multiyear exploration of the Golden Record, a gold-plated phonograph recording containing sounds and images selected in the late 1970s by a team at NASA to portray life on Earth to extraterrestrials. Supported by related sculptures and works on paper, the centerpiece of the exhibition is Robleto’s newly commissioned work Ancient Beacons Long for Notice, an immersive, 70-minute film based on a rare and forgotten document—the first audio recording of warfare—which was considered for inclusion on the Golden Record. Ancient Beacons Long for Notice is the third and final installment in a trilogy of video and sound installations that comprise Robleto’s years-long investigation of the scientific, philosophical, and moral tensions of attempts to represent the totality of human life even after humans cease to exist.
This exhibition, organized by the Carter, highlights the Museum’s works on paper holdings from the 18th through the 21st centuries. Celebrating both historical and modernist artworks, the exhibition presents depictions of nature from the first investigations of the American landscape by European American artists to modernism’s use of up-close observation of nature as a way of rendering the real world through abstraction. With work by artists including John James Audubon, Thomas Moran, and Sandy Rodriguez, the exhibition explores botanical and zoological beauty in all of its minute complexity while celebrating the Carter’s collection.
