A Roadmap to Stardust
May 10 – September 14, 2025
Drawing on antiquarian images of the heavens, origin stories, and myths of early civilizations, A Roadmap to Stardust is a modern inquiry into the cosmos and humankind’s eagerness to explore distant planets. Astronomy, the most ancient of the natural sciences, is entwined with the religious, mythological, cosmological, and astrological beliefs of prehistory. While humans have looked to the stars for millennia, future stargazing may take on a more urgent tone as an escape from Earth’s changing climate.
Conceived by artists Neil Forrest and John Roloff (collaboratively known as OortCloudX), phase one of the three-part project, A Roadmap to Stardust, unfolds as an origin story around the excavation of an imagined archaeological site. Here, faux-historical artifacts hint at the discovery of the first telescope, assembled from a compilation of Greek amphora, crocodile skulls, warrior gear, and early technologies.
Inspired by the famous Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, wherein the titular character embarks on a journey to discover the secret to everlasting life, the immersive installation combines mysticism and modern science to reimagine the characters in a present-day narrative, influenced by science fiction and popular culture. Dioramas and cinematic murals illustrate past and future scenes: a past in which the ‘Sumerians’ built the telescope to scour the night sky; and a future in which astronaut characters, depicted as puppets, arrive on an unnamed, distant planet.
Within this alternative archeology, OortCloudX uses craft as a lens to look forward and back in time, searching through Western and non-Western cultures to inform their artistic investigation into speculative sciences. Two subsequent phases of the exhibition, taking place over the course of two years, will plot the exploration and exploitation of a fictional planet, and create imagined alternatives to manifest destiny and ecological anxiety.
Image: OortCloud X (Neil Forrest and John Roloff), Roadmap to Stardust Debris Pile Fabrication, 2024. Courtesy of the artists.
ARTISTS
Neil Forrest is an internationally exhibiting ceramic artist whose works emphasize corporeality and materiality.Forrest is noted for rethinking ornament in post-modern space. His architectonic strategies extend the reach of ceramics as three-dimensional matrices that could fill built spaces. His recent works and installations pursue specific questions of topical or anthropological concern. More narrative in nature, these often conflate historical archetypes with popular modernist iconography.
As a member of the collaborative OortCloudX, John Roloff and Neil Forrest create installations inspired from specific ceramic artifacts that offer ideas and questions towards our collective future. Forrest has 14 one-person exhibitions and over 80 group exhibitions to his credit. Exhibitions include Overthrown at the Denver Art Museum, the Cheongju Biennale in Korea and The Washingtonian Service in Washington D.C. He’s received several Canadian and Norwegian arts grants and lectured at international architecture and craft conferences. Neil Forrest is professor emeritus at NSCAD University and former research professor at The Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Norway.
John Roloff is an internationally exhibiting artist who works conceptually with site, process, and natural systems in the form of environmental and gallery installations. His work is fundamentally about ecology in an expanded frame engaging interrelated cycles of natural and man-made materials and processes. This world view, originating in studies of the earth sciences, was developed through the practice of ceramics, installations, and conceptual proposals to evolve site-alchemical and transformative merging of physical matter and living systems across geologic time through the lens of global metabolism.
John’s work has been seen both outdoors and in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, UC Berkeley Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution, Photoscene Cologne, the Venice Architectural and Art Biennales and The Snow Show, Kemi, Finland. A recipient of 3 artists visual arts fellowships from the NEA, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, a California Arts Council grant for visual artists and a Bernard Osher Fellowship at the Exploratorium, he is Professor Emeritus in Sculpture/Ceramics, San Francisco Art Institute. He is represented by the Anglim/Trimble gallery in San Francisco, CA.
