The 12th SITE Santa Fe International exhibition, titled "Once Within a Time," draws inspiration from science fiction writer Ted Chiang's 1998 story "Story of Your Life," where aliens arrive on Earth in mirror-like spaceships that serve as communication devices. In the story, linguist Dr. Louise Banks learns to decipher the alien language and begins to perceive time as they do - as simultaneous events rather than sequential ones - ultimately glimpsing her own future.
Curator Cecilia Alemani has identified Chiang as one of the exhibition's 27 influential figures, serving as catalysts for the 71 participating artists and more than two dozen writers. The exhibition takes reflection as a major theme, incorporating mirror images, doubles, reversals, and echoes within curated sections such as "The Wheel of Telling" and "The Secret Life of Puppets." These elements offer visitors concurrent rather than sequential experiences, allowing multiple perspectives and timelines to unfold simultaneously.
The exhibition's treatment of time and reflection is evident throughout the artwork displays. Among the echoing narratives are works by Nora Turato and Will Rawls. Turato's mural "I WANT OUT!" (2025), a red vinyl triptych with one panel per word, is installed on SITE Santa Fe's exterior, while inside the museum, Rawls's "Amphigory" (2022), a series of inky, glitchy screen prints, seems to respond with the barely legible phrase "U Can't Escape Alive."
The gallery featuring Rawls also displays a suite of 72 computer drawings from 1969 by hard-edge abstract painter Frederick Hammersley, who died in 2009 at age 90. After hitting an artistic dry spell in the late 1960s and saying "I painted myself out," Hammersley enrolled in a computer class for artists at the University of New Mexico. He used the program ART 1 to create multiple printouts comprising the suite on view, featuring visually undulating abstract compositions of gray monochrome letters, numbers, and punctuation marks.
In SITE's central gallery space, color-rich reverse paintings on glass by Rebecca Salsbury James, born in 1891, capture attention with their depictions of vases of flowers, snakes, and dreamlike landscapes. These works reflect her time in Taos, New Mexico, alongside notable figures like Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O'Keeffe, and other New York-to-Taos transplants. A selection from James's collection of miniatures, including figurines, mirrors, and devotional objects, is also displayed, with many pieces appearing in pairs or otherwise doubled.
The exhibition creates a funhouse or hall of mirrors effect through various artistic installations. Louise Bonnet's fleshy, misshapen, iridescent-skinned figures prompt reflection on human forms as equally warped and grotesque, alien to New Mexico's desert environment. Katja Seib's large-scale portrait paintings present reflection in both literal and metaphysical terms, with "Cornucopia" (2025) depicting a fortune teller revealing cards to viewers while a framed image in the background creates an infinity mirror effect.
Norman Zammitt's dark paintings of bodily appendages, genitals, and other parts make symmetry seem sensuously sinister. These works were previously censored in Albuquerque when shown at the University of New Mexico. Zhang Yunyao plays with bodily symmetry in his large-scale, abstract graphite drawings on felt, creating detailed, dynamic forms that bring to mind corsets, cages, or skeletons in renderings that appear laborious and painfully pleasurable.
The exhibition addresses New Mexico's complex relationship with water through the theme "Land of Little Rain," though this section provides limited reflection on Santa Fe's political tensions around water scarcity. Despite featuring a mural by Minerva Cuevas referencing General Electric's extractive practices, the section doesn't clearly connect global warming and the fossil fuel industry to New Mexico, the nation's third-largest energy producer of oil and gas.
"Once Within a Time" directly confronts the horrors of the atomic bomb and its devastating impact on Japanese communities in New Mexico and beyond. David Horowitz's installation "flock of wingless birds" (2025) consists of 4,555 handmade clear glass marbles scattered on the central gallery's floor, representing Japanese-descent men held prisoner in Santa Fe's internment camps, sites now covered by the Casa Solana subdivision. Sand in each marble, from a nearby dry arroyo, sparkles like fool's gold as it refracts light.
At Finquita, a partner venue seven miles north in Tesuque village, Na Mira presents the destabilizing installation "Marquee" (2023), a 16mm film utilizing the floor, multiple mirrors, a 90-degree corner, and a transistor radio to echo, duplicate, and collapse image, narrative, place, and time. Text and audio in both English and Korean address cultural assimilation, dislocation, and fractured memory.
The exhibition tackles Spanish colonialism and religious conversion through Maja Ruznic's commissioned paintings installed in the New Mexico Museum of Art's auditorium. These works are placed over existing traditional murals of St. Francis of Assisi originally conceived by Donald Beauregard, who died before their completion. Ruznic's verdant paintings of ghostly figures in landscapes act as gossamer veils to other worlds and ways of knowing, channeling people and spirits related to her experiences growing up in Bosnia.
Daisy Quezada Ureña's commission "Past [between] Present" (2025) at the New Mexico History Museum interrogates cultural systems while magnifying personal experiences, histories, and relationships. The installation includes bell fragments from the Pueblo Revolt and soil from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum's new wing construction site, prompting visitors to reflect on the land and stories upon which cultural institutions are built.
Santa Fe-based artist Godfrey Reggio, whose film "Once Within a Time" (2022) inspired the exhibition, characterizes his work as a Bardic tale chronicling events in a future when all humans have left reality. He states, "We are programmed to remember to forget - the word, the symbol, the sign no longer describes the world we live in."
The 12th SITE Santa Fe International: "Once Within a Time" continues at SITE Santa Fe through January 12, 2026, curated by Cecilia Alemani and assistant curator Marina Caron. The exhibition reflects numerous layered narratives linked to Santa Fe, presenting stories that are simultaneously inspiring and generative alongside others that are painful, overwhelming, and incomplete, offering hope that these coming and going exhibitions will help decipher what the future is trying to communicate.
