Other Worlds: Group Exhibition

Other Worlds considers the enduring influence of Surrealism through the work of contemporary female-identifying artists whose practices engage dreams, mysticism, perception, and imagined realities.

Accompanying the exhibition is a newly commissioned text by Courtenay Finn, Chief Curator and Director of Programs at the UC Irvine Langson Institute and Museum of California Art and former curator of the Aspen Art Museum. Finn’s essay traces a lineage from pioneering Surrealist artists such as Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo to a new generation of artists navigating the psychological and political complexities of the present moment.

“Surrealism’s power lies not in its relationship to the past, but in its capacity to imagine and create new futures. At the core of their work is the importance of the dream - an emblem of an alternate, more authentic reality and a poetic, poignant reminder that imagination is a form of liberation. Revealing hidden orders and unseen truths, the exhibition offers an image of reality that is both familiar and uncanny, strange and marvelous, fraught and freeing”

- Courtenay Finn

Emerging from the uncertainty and upheaval of the early twentieth century, Surrealism sought to dissolve the boundaries between dreams and reality. For many women artists, however, the movement also became a means of reclaiming authorship, autonomy, and identity through image-making. A century later, the artists in Other Worlds continue this evolving dialogue, constructing portals into spaces that are at once intimate and uncanny, grounded yet fantastical.

Working across painting and sculpture, the artists in the exhibition use dream imagery, speculative landscapes, and hybrid forms to reflect on the complexities of contemporary life while imagining alternative futures shaped by intuition, memory, and transformation.