Of Time and the River of Matter and Knowledge

Dario Robleto’s Film and Exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Deftly Straddle Time and Space, Art and Science

Dario Robleto, American Seabed (detail), © Dario Robleto.jpg | Photo: Courtesy of the artist

By Fri Jan 03, 2025 | 03:22pm

Texas-based artist Dario Robleto has found unique ways of getting art and science to dance together, subtly and persuasively. As seen in the fascinating show Dario Robleto: The Signal, now at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA), Robleto is a deep-diving conceptual artist — reading the wall texts and grasping the art’s secret agendas is critical — who craftily fuses and confuses layers of history, culture, and the natural order of the cosmos.

Channeling his scientific interests and research into distinctive sculptural and multimedia artworks, Robleto embeds meanings and metaphors beyond and beneath the deceptively calm and lyrical surfaces of his art. A butterfly display case; a series of kaleidoscopic, constellation-esque vistas; and a series of gold-plated “jewelry” take on new and deeper reflections — once you know the secrets in the art’s bones.

Robleto’s willful art-science matchmaking is on vibrant display in the centerpiece of the SBMA exhibition, which showcases his elaborate new film project, Ancient Beacons Long for Notice, co-commissioned by SBMA and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. The 70-minute black-and-white film, made in collaboration with Skye Ashbrook and Jennifer Roberts, is a strange but hypnotic hybrid of art film and documentary on the ambitious “Golden Record” of human and earthly data sent far into the universe, hitching a ride on NASA’s 1977 Voyager exploration. Presently, Voyager’s epic journey has taken it more than 15 billion miles from its terra firma launch pad.

Rotunda Clock and Planets still from “Ancient Beacons Long for Notice,” 2024. 4K video, 5.1 surround sound installation. © Dario Robleto | Photo: Courtesy
Astronaut and Nerves still from “Ancient Beacons Long for Notice,” 2024. 4K video, 5.1 surround sound installation. © Dario Robleto | Photo: Courtesy
Bali Dancer still from “Ancient Beacons Long for Notice,” 2024. 4K video, 5.1 surround sound installation. © Dario Robleto | Photo: Courtesy
Warrior still from “Ancient Beacons Long for Notice,” 2024. 4K video, 5.1 surround sound installation. © Dario Robleto | Photo: Courtesy

A separate film viewing module at one end of the McCormick Gallery intentionally allows only a small number of viewers to bask in the pop-up theater space, letting us sink more effectively into the film’s mutating flow of footage from outer space and “cosmic quietude,” the glories of human achievement as well as the ravages of WWI trench warfare, and other collaged and montaged material, while Ashbrook’s meditative ambient musical score wafts over the saga.

Midway through the film, the pieces come into focus with the tale of the Golden Record artistic director Ann Druyan (who also fell in love with the project curator Carl Sagan). Druyan insists on folding in evidence of not only the high points of earthly life, but also its foibles and destructive impulses, and goes to subversive lengths to include darker aspects of the human experiment in what Robleto describes as a “gift to a melancholic universe.”

The film’s mixed identity can sometimes elicit mixed responses, as when the text goes too far into the florid zone, or when mannered visual trickery slips into an almost satirical mode, as if poking fun at retro science film kitsch. Despite its slippery essence, the film manages to provoke thought and contemplation on a cosmic scale.

“Survival Does Not Lie in the Heavens” by Dario Robleto | Photo: Josef Woodard

Sculptural and print works help to expand awareness of Robleto’s thematic concerns and his cohesive aesthetic, and in the quieter, more layered domain of artwork contemplation, versus the sensory demands of film. “Survival Does Not Lie in the Heavens” appears to be a color-coded night-sky triptych, but its beams of light actually derive from album cover art from live recordings of now-deceased jazz, blues, and gospel artists. Robleto thus pulls a fast one and reverses the hierarchy of celestial and mortal references, lending new meaning to the term “stars,” and to their finite life span.

Musical culture also slyly sneaks in the side door of the dramatic piece “American Seabed,” which appears to be a dazzling display of iridescent butterflies in a case centered in the large gallery space. But wait: those butterfly antennae are, in fact, made from magnetic tapes of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” — another nod to mortality — and the insects are nestled on fossilized whale ear bones salvaged from the bottom of the ocean. Time, archeology and culture intertwine, in unexpected ways.

Dario Robleto, American Seabed, 2014, © Dario Robleto | Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Elsewhere in the show, two apparently very different sets of works — the muted gray prints encircling one small gallery space and a set of glittery golden jewelry pieces in a display case — are both drawn from seminal heart waveforms created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “Primitive” medical technology meets biological/emotional verities, and contemporary artistic reimagining.

Robleto’s somehow idiosyncratic yet internally logical art — and film — turns our heads in unexpected ways, leading to meditations on being and the universal order. This show, on view through May 25, is a gift to the artworld universe, both melancholic and given to wonder. 

Dario Robleto: The Signal is at Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1130 State St.). Call (805) 963-4364 or visit sbma.net.

Related Posts

Premier Events

See Full Event Calendar

More like this

Exit mobile version