SANTA FE — In 1998, science fiction author Ted Chiang printed “Story of Your Life,” through which aliens come to Earth in “looking glasses,” mirrored spaceships that act as communication units. The central character, linguist Dr. Louise Banks, is tasked with deciphering the aliens’ language. In flip, she begins to see time like they do — as simultaneous occasions — and in the end glimpses her personal future. 

A reference to “Story of Your Life” is tucked into the exhibition guidebook for As soon as Inside a Time, SITE Santa Fe’s twelfth Worldwide. Curator Cecilia Alemani recognized Chiang as one of many exhibition’s 27 “figures of interest” — catalysts for the 71 collaborating artists and greater than two dozen writers. What struck me about Alemani’s inclusion of Chiang’s writing was not the reference to extraterrestrial life (many readers might be conversant in the accounts of UFO sightings in New Mexico), however the surreal, endlessly fascinating phenomenon of the trying glass. 

As soon as Inside a Time takes reflection as a significant cue. Inside every curated theme, comparable to “The Wheel of Telling” and “The Secret Life of Puppets,” are mirror photos, doubles, reversals, and echoes, together with symmetries of place, histories, peoples, and legends — providing exhibition guests concurrent moderately than sequential occasions, through which a number of views and timelines unfold. Even the therapy of the exhibition title, through which “Time” is printed the other way up, gestures to alternative routes of experiencing the temporal, reflective nature of each artwork and language. 

Set up view of works by Rebecca Salsbury James (courtesy SITE SANTA FE, picture by Brad Trone, 2025)

Among the many many echoing narratives are works by Nora Turato and Will Rawls. Turato’s mural “I WANT OUT!” (2025), a crimson vinyl triptych with one panel per phrase, is put in on the outside of SITE Santa Fe, the primary venue; contained in the museum, Rawls’s Amphigory (2022), a collection of inky, glitchy display screen prints, appears to answer Turato’s plea with the hardly legible phrase “U Can’t Escape Alive.” 

Within the gallery with Rawls is a collection of 72 laptop drawings from 1969 by hard-edge summary painter Frederick Hammersley, who died in 2009 at age 90. He hit a creative dry spell within the late ’60s, saying, “I painted myself out,” a situation of exhaustion, liberation, or maybe each. To shake issues up, he enrolled in a pc class for artists on the College of New Mexico. He used this system ART 1 to create a number of printouts of the person “drawings” that comprise the suite on view, visually undulating summary compositions of grey monochrome letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. With further displays of Chester Nez and the “Original 29” Navajo Code Talkers, Autumn Chacon’s radio frequency set up, and others, guests might expertise some critically surreal data-driven reverberations.  

Set up view of David Horvitz, “flock of wingless birds” (2025) (courtesy SITE SANTA FE, picture by Brad Trone, 2025)

In SITE’s central gallery area, color-rich reverse work on glass — a vase of flowers, a snake, a dreamlike panorama — by Rebecca Salsbury James, born in 1891, have been simply odd sufficient to make me linger and take into account her time in Taos, New Mexico, with Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O’Keeffe, and different New York-to-Taos transplants. A range from James’s assortment of miniatures, together with collectible figurines, mirrors, and devotional objects, can be on view, lots of that are in pairs or in any other case doubled. One tells a narrative, however two maintain a dialog. 

Elsewhere within the gallery, I felt like I used to be in a funhouse or corridor of mirrors. Louise Bonnet’s fleshy, misshapen, iridescent-skinned figures had me reflecting alone pale, bony body as equally warped and grotesque, alien to New Mexico’s desert surroundings. Katja Seib’s large-scale portrait work current the idea of reflection in literal and metaphysical phrases. For instance, “Cornucopia” (2025) depicts a fortune teller revealing her playing cards to the viewer; within the background, a framed picture of one other girl doing the identical creates an infinity mirror impact. Close by, a journey chest that belonged to Doña Tules, dubbed the “Queen of Sin” for her enterprise actions (playing and presumably a brothel), sits within the nook lit by a crimson gentle bulb, which I learn as a heavy-handed reference to the stigma utilized to different fiercely unbiased ladies who’ve come to the area. 

Katja Seib, “Cornucopia” (2025), oil on canvas (picture Nancy Zastudil/Hyperallergic)

Norman Zammitt’s darkish work of bodily appendages, genitals, and different components make symmetry appear sensuously sinister; the works on view have been censored in Albuquerque once they have been proven on the College of New Mexico. Zhang Yunyao additionally performs with bodily symmetry in his large-scale, summary graphite drawings on felt. His detailed, dynamic types call to mind a corset, cage, or skeleton, in renderings that seem laborious, even painfully pleasurable. Throughout the gallery, Terran Final Gun’s ink and coloured pencil drawings on vintage ledger paper repeat symmetrical, hard-edge geometric types that allude to conventional Piikani visible motifs and modernist abstraction. 

Among the many present’s themes, “Land of Little Rain” is without doubt one of the extra obtuse; it does little to replicate or talk Santa Fe’s advanced relationship to and political tensions round water and its rising shortage, even with a mural by Minerva Cuevas that references Normal Electrical’s extractive practices. Nor does it clarify the connection between the worldwide warming disaster and the fossil gas business in relation to New Mexico — the state is the nation’s third largest power producer, primarily of oil and fuel. If ever there was a surreal matter to discover, it’s life with out water. Contemplating the poignant, reflective nature of water itself, quite a few native artists and writers deeply engaged with the subject, and hundreds of years of Indigenous data to seek the advice of, I discovered myself wanting a extra radical curatorial strategy.

Set up view of Na Mira, “Marquee” (2023) (courtesy SITE SANTA FE, picture by Brad Trone, 2025)

As soon as Inside a Time doesn’t draw back, nonetheless, from reflecting on the horrors of the atomic bomb and its devastating affect on Japanese communities in New Mexico and past. The subject is addressed in a number of artworks on view at SITE, and others at Finquita, a companion venue seven miles north within the village of Tesuque. David Horowitz’s set up “flock of wingless birds” (2025) consists of 4,555 handmade clear glass marbles scattered on the central gallery’s flooring. They characterize the lads of Japanese descent who have been held prisoner in Santa Fe’s internment camps, websites which have since been coated over by the Casa Solana subdivision. Sand in every marble, from a close-by dry arroyo, sparkles like idiot’s gold as they refract gentle. Famous within the exhibition guidebook because the “relentless repetition of one small form,” the set up honors the lads’s lives whereas additionally illustrating the precarity of navigating previous, current, and future. 

In an outbuilding at Finquita, previously the Shidoni bronze foundry, is Na Mira’s destabilizing set up of “Marquee” (2023), a 16mm movie that makes use of the ground, a number of mirrors, a 90-degree nook of the room, and a transistor radio to echo, duplicate, and collapse picture, narrative, place, and time. Textual content and audio in each English and Korean level to cultural assimilation, dislocation, and fractured reminiscence. 

Tales about New Mexico necessitate discussions about Spanish colonialism and non secular conversion. Whereas many individuals of religion consider that God made people in his picture, a mirror of the divine, Maja Ruznic presents one other model of creation. Her commissioned work are put in within the New Mexico Museum of Artwork’s auditorium, positioned over some present conventional murals of St. Francis of Assisi, initially conceived by Donald Beauregard, who died earlier than their completion. Ruznic’s verdant work of ghostly figures within the panorama act as gossamer veils to different worlds and methods of understanding, channeling folks and spirits that relate, in some instances, to her experiences rising up in Bosnia. When Alemani confirmed these set up photos throughout her curator’s discuss, the viewers’s gasp of shock that the older murals have been coated made clear that Ruznic had hit a nerve — in all the precise methods.  

Set up view of Maja Ruznic, “Kiša Pada, Trava Raste, GoraZeleni,” “The Littlest God,” and “At Eternity’s Gate (for van Gogh)” (all 2025) (courtesy SITE SANTA FE, picture by Brad Trone, 2025)

A lot of Santa Fe’s historical past is hidden in plain sight. Daisy Quezada Ureña’s fee “Past [between] Present” (2025) on the New Mexico Historical past Museum interrogates the methods and constructions at work in tradition whereas magnifying the significance of private experiences, histories, and relationships. Amongst different poignant objects within the set up, whether or not borrowed, gifted, fabricated, or excavated, are bell fragments from the Pueblo Revolt and soil from the development website of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s new wing. Right here, Quezada Ureña prompts guests to replicate on the land and tales on which cultural establishments are constructed. Seen by the museum home windows is the Palace of the Governor’s market portal, the place Native artists and artisans nonetheless promote their works to vacationers as they did within the early 1900s. One jewellery maker I spoke with was unaware of As soon as Inside a Time, referencing a scarcity of communication from museum employees. I used to be reminded that for all of its outreach efforts, an exhibition as formidable as this could nonetheless overlook the obvious alternatives for inclusion and illustration.

Consistent with what historical past can reveal, Santa Fe-based artist Godfrey Reggio says, “We are programmed to remember to forget … the word, the symbol, the sign no longer describes the world we live in.” He characterizes his movie As soon as Inside a Time (2022), which impressed the exhibition, as a Bardic story that chronicles an occasion set in a future when all people have left actuality. In Chiang’s story, the aliens depart Earth of their trying glasses, with no definitive cause why they arrived or departed. SITE’s twelfth Worldwide displays quite a few layered narratives linked to Santa Fe, ones which can be inspiring and generative in tandem with others which can be painful, overwhelming, and incomplete. My hope is that the exhibition’s coming and going, just like the tales it presents, will assist us decipher what the longer term is attempting to speak. 

Element of Rebecca Salsbury James’s miniatures assortment (picture Nancy Zastudil/Hyperallergic)

Doña Tules, “Peteca” (journey chest) (c. nineteenth century), wooden, rawhide, wool fabric, and iron (picture Nancy Zastudil/Hyperallergic)

Set up view of twelfth SITE SANTA FE Worldwide: As soon as Inside a Time. Left wall: Norman Zammitt, Boxed Figures collection (1962); proper wall: Louise Bonnet, Enclosures collection (courtesy SITE SANTA FE, picture by Brad Trone, 2025)

Zhang Yunyao, (left) “Connector VII” and (proper) “Connector VIII” (each 2025) (picture Nancy Zastudil/Hyperallergic)

Set up view of twelfth SITE SANTA FE Worldwide: As soon as Inside a Time. Prime of left wall/proper wall: Will Rawls, Amphigory (2022); backside of left wall: Autumn Chacon, “Between Our Mother’s Voice and Ou rFather’s Ear” (2016–ongoing) (courtesy SITE SANTA FE, picture by Brad Trone, 2025)

Set up view of Daisy Quezada Ureña, “Past [between] Present” (2025) (courtesy SITE SANTA FE, picture by Brad Trone, 2025)

Set up view of twelfth SITE SANTA FE Worldwide: As soon as Inside a Time. Left wall: Marilou Schultz, (left to proper) “Stock Market Digital Image” (2022), “Integrated Circuit Chip & AI Diné Weaving” (2024), and “Popular Chip” (2025); proper wall: Laptop-generated ink drawings by Frederick Hammersley (1969) (courtesy SITE SANTA FE, picture by Brad Trone, 2025)

twelfth SITE SANTA FE Worldwide: As soon as Inside a Time continues at SITE Santa Fe (1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, New Mexico) by January 12, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Cecilia Alemani and assistant curator Marina Caron.