Afterlight features the work of artists who use the visuals of outer space to explore the relationship between hope and loss in our contemporary moment. Curated by students in professor Natalie Pellolio’s seminar Intergalactic: The Visual Culture and Politics of Outer Space (Fall 2025), this exhibition explores how artists use images of planets, stars, satellites, and telescopes to ask what it means to reach outward in a world that feels increasingly unstable. Their work exists on the border between light and dark, asking whether we should view our future as one awash in the deepness of dusk or painted in the colors of the luminous sun. Through the visual language of science and fantasy, these works examine what we hold onto after the light has shifted: what remains, what endures, and what becomes visible only in darkness.

Afterlight is on view January 21–February 20, 2026.