Against Outer Space, Curated by Zachary Korol Gold and Valerie Olson

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On View: November 15, 2025–February 28, 2026

IRVINE, Calif., Oct. 30, 2025 – The Beall Center for Art + Technology at the University of California, Irvine, is pleased to announce the opening of Against Outer Space, curated by Zachary Korol Gold, assistant curator of the Beall Center, and Valerie Olson, associate professor of anthropology. The exhibition opens on Saturday, Nov. 15, 2025, from 2 to 5 p.m., and will run through Saturday, February 28, 2026.

The outsideness of outer space never made sense to us. Earthly life unfolds both within and against a porous boundary with unearthly space. The planet has always been — and will always be known to be —in a dynamic relationship with extraterrestrial energies and materials. All societies feature stars, suns, meteors and celestial events within their origin stories and descendance lineages. Contemporary scientific stories assert, for instance, that solar energy is the catalyst for all life processes and that Earth’s water may have come from ancient cometary collisions. And in these myriad stories, life on Earth is made possible by essential barriers between here and what lies beyond.

Against Outer Space brings together a group of artworks that materialize this inside-outside paradox without attempting resolution. They do so by working with and beyond dominant technoscientific ideologies about outer space. In those ideologies, governments, militaries and industries can tend to represent space as apart, unruly, hostile, inaccessible and exclusive in order to justify bids to occupy and control it. In such perceptions, outer space appears to be an empty finders-keepers frontier.

Artworks in the exhibition contend with those aesthetics and invite other older and newer visions. They do not treat space as out of reach, but as a place full of places that are continuously connected to everyday lifeworlds. Outer space, in this open invitation, is not separate. Space objects are lively. Earthly beings share photonic and chemical kinship with these entities. Images of space and the night sky invoke an intimacy with immensity. Space bridges ancestry and futurity in a vibrant way. 

Its close outsideness allows new questions, new recognitions, new ways of being.

“Outer space is a hot topic in some places these days — it engenders strong emotions, positive and negative,” said Valerie Olson. “Zachary and I wanted to open up a space for artists to express their relationship to the controversy and wonder of outer space as a zone that resists all efforts to territorially claim it and scientifically define it as one thing. I am grateful to the energized constellation of UCI schools and departments that came together to make this vision of multiple outer spaces possible.” 

Zachary Korol Gold states, “This project pilots a curatorial model at the Beall Center that bridges schools at UCI, pairing faculty across campus with Beall curators to realize collaborative exhibitions. I was very glad when the executive director, Jesse Colin Jackson, connected me with Valerie to discuss our shared interest in the cultures and visual production of outer space. It was incredibly rewarding to collaborate with Professor Olson to curate Against Outer Space, and to see her rigorous theoretical anthropology framework translate into discussions with contemporary artists. I feel that our interdisciplinary approach is mirrored by the artworks contributing to the exhibition, which emerge from diverse practices but nonetheless share a strong thematic thread.”

Against Outer Space is part of a series of special events celebrating the Beall Center’s 25th Anniversary. The opening reception will take place on Saturday, November 15, from 2 to 5 p.m. The Beall Center offers free admission and is open to the public during the academic year from Tuesday–Saturday, noon–6 p.m. 

Against Outer Space is supported by The Beall Family Foundation and the Claire Trevor School of the Arts.

Artists

Kelly Akashi, Beatriz Cortez and rafa esparza, Anna Friz and Rodrigo Ríos Zunino, Charles Gaines, Erin Genia, Julie F Hill, Rob Reynolds, Sarah Rosalena, Alice Wang and Marcus Zúñiga.

About the Curators

Zachary Korol Gold lives in Los Angeles, where he researches ecological aesthetics and contemporary art. He is assistant curator at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, UC Irvine. Recent exhibitions include Common Ground: Early 20th-Century Artist Communities in Southern California, co-curated with Ileana De Giuseppe and Dada Wang at the UC Irvine Langson Institute and Museum of California Art, 2025; Maxwell’s Demon at Canary Test, Los Angeles, 2024; and Expanded Ecologies at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, 2023. Upcoming exhibitions include Ecotechnics at the Beall Center, 2027. He recently published “Artifice and Effigy” in Kim Schoen’s artist book A Bouquet, 2025. Forthcoming publications include essays in artist monographs by Tuomas A. Laitinen and Alice Wang. From 2016-2020, he directed the exhibition space Garden with Britte Geijer Gold. In 2015, he received a B.A. in Visual Art from Brown University, and he is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Visual Studies at UC Irvine, where he is writing his dissertation, Reconfiguring Nature, Technology, and Sense: Pierre Huyghe’s Situated Artworks.

Valerie Olson is an associate professor of anthropology at UC Irvine. She is interested in how social groups form relationships with spaces that exceed their everyday experience on the surface of the planet. In particular, she studies the political and cultural aspects of social engagements with large environmental spaces such as watersheds, the deep ocean, and outer space. In addition, she is interested in new ways to teach and design ethnographic research. She is the author of the first full-length ethnography of human spaceflight, Into the Extreme: US Environmental Politics and Systems Beyond Earth (Minnesota University Press, 2018). She also authored, with Kristin Peterson, The Ethnographer’s Way: A Handbook for Multidimensional Research Design (Duke University Press), which was named one of the best scholarly books of 2024 by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

About the Beall Center for Art + Technology: The Beall Center is an exhibition and research center located at the University of California, Irvine, in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. Since its opening in 2000, the Beall Center has promoted new forms of creation and expression by building innovative scholarly relationships and community collaborations among artists, scientists, and technologists and by encouraging research and development of art forms that can affect the future. For artists, the Beall Center serves as a proving ground – a place between the artist’s studio and the art museum – and allows them to work with new technologies in their early stages of development. For visitors, the Beall Center serves as a window to the most imaginative and creative visual arts innovations. The curatorial focus is a diverse range of innovative, world-renowned artists, both national and international, who work with experimental and interactive media. The Beall Center received its initial support from the Rockwell Corp. in honor of retired chairman Don Beall and his wife, Joan – the core idea being to merge their lifelong passions of business, engineering, and the arts in one place. Today major support is generously provided by the Beall Family Foundation. For more information, visit www.beallcenter.uci.edu. 

About the Claire Trevor School of the Arts: The UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts is where scholarly research and creative activity converge. As the only comprehensive arts school in the University of California system, it includes four departments: art, dance, drama and music. The school offers 15 undergraduate and graduate degree programs and two minors that combine rigorous artistic training with a world-class liberal arts education. Named for Academy Award-winning actress Claire Trevor, the school presents more than 200 public performances, exhibitions and lectures each year. Students and faculty engage in studio practice, performance, academic study and interdisciplinary research, often collaborating across campus and within the community. Recognized nationally for its excellence, access and affordability, the school prepares the next generation of creative leaders who shape culture, drive innovation and make a difference in the world. For more information, visit www.arts.uci.edu.

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced five Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 36,000 students and offers 224 degree programs. It’s located in one of the world’s safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County’s second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UCI, visit www.uci.edu.

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