Andrea Carlson, Cara Romero in Pacific Standard Time, CA

A landmark arts event explores the intersections between art and science through more than 70 exhibitions in south California, featuring Andrea Carlson and Cara Romero in Los Angeles-based exhibitions as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide.

Cara Romero’s work Three Sisters is included in Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology at the Autry Museum of the American West. The exhibition considers the rise of Indigenous Futurisms in contemporary Indigenous art “as a means of enduring colonial trauma, creating alternative futures and advocating for Indigenous technologies in a more inclusive present and sustainable future.” Three Sisters (2022) depicts three women in their respective Native specificities. Romero draws the title and inspiration from what is intertribally known as the three sisters garden. Romero describes the garden as “an example of indigenous science – sometimes called T.E.K. or Traditional Ecological Knowledge – that demonstrates the sophisticated empirical science that has helped tribes live sustainably and in harmony within our environments for thousands of years.” Specific tribal patterns digitally inscribed across the women’s bodies feel wired through time, emitting an aesthetic of futurity.

Andrea Carlson is one of twenty-seven artists included in the group exhibition and catalog, Scientia Sexualis, at The Institute of Contemporary Art. Organizers Jennifer Doyle and Jeanne Vaccaro aim “to examine and reconfigure the relationship between art and science and, in turn, to create an alternative access point to the history of science where sex, gender and pleasure are concerned.” Carlson’s multipanel and multimedia work on paper, Sunshine on a Cannibal (2015) visualizes concepts and constructions of the “other” through practices of cultural cannibalism. Above and below multiple shifting horizon lines, representations of charged imagery commingle and collide in waters and on lands, including Native American petroglyphs, the Tower of Babel, and Yves Kline’s Anthropométries in relation to the title of the Italian exploitation film in which they were appropriated. 

Scientia Sexualis at ICA runs through March 2, 2025 while Future Imaginaries at the Autry Museum of the American West runs through June 21, 2026.