Lost in Space: Alicia Piller's Material Cosmology at Track 16
- Kristine Schomaker
- 34 minutes ago
- 7 min read
By Kristine Schomaker The work hits immediately. Not one piece — all of it, simultaneously. Large sculptural assemblages covering the walls, a freestanding sculpture in the middle of the room, a piece suspended from the ceiling. The whole gallery feeling like its own solar system, each work a satellite orbiting something enormous and unspoken.
Last night, four humans splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after flying around the Moon for the first time in more than fifty years. Artemis II launched April 1, 2026 — the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17 in 1972. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen. The crew included the first woman, the first person of color, and the first Canadian to travel to the Moon's vicinity. They flew around the far side on April 6 and came home last night.
Who gets to go to space? Who gets to be seen there? Who gets to stay visible?
Alicia Piller's Lost in Space is asking the same things.
The show runs through May 9 at Track 16 in East Hollywood.
What You're Actually Looking At
The materials alone take a minute to absorb. Abalone shell. Coral. Sea sponge. Layers of salvaged factory-floor paint that have built up over time like geological strata. Recycled 3D-printed components made in collaboration with the artist duo Bec/Col. Celestial images pulled from a 1982 astronomy book — the year of Piller's birth — that appear throughout the work like anchors, connecting personal origin to deep cosmic time.
And embedded within all of this: photographs. Small, framed, held inside the structures like relics. Dred Scott. George Washington Carver. Octavia Butler. Augusta Savage. Edmonia Lewis. Breonna Taylor. Piller's own African American great-great-grandmother, whose lineage traces to the late nineteenth century.
These aren't decorations. They're gravitational centers. The entire material field of each work orbits around these faces.
The process is tactile and recursive — sewing, binding, layering, building surfaces over time. The work echoes biological growth and geological pressure simultaneously. It looks like something that grew rather than something that was built, though clearly it was built with enormous care and intention. Each piece is structurally tough. You sense they would be difficult to pull apart. That's not accidental.
Lost in What Space, Exactly
The title is doing a lot.
There's the obvious reading — outer space, the cosmos, the celestial images throughout. But stand in the room long enough and the other meanings start surfacing. Lost in the space of the gallery. Lost in the negative space of white walls. Lost in the space between reality and fiction, between what history recorded and what it chose to omit. Lost in time.
The press release frames it directly: as public histories are revised, removed, or silenced — plaques taken down, language restricted, truths treated as liabilities — Lost in Space responds to what it calls "a growing cultural impulse to erase the past rather than confront it." The show insists that what has been marginalized or made invisible continues to exert force. It shapes the present whether or not we acknowledge it.
That framing matters right now.
The Theory Underneath
Piller cites theoretical physicist and cosmologist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein as a key influence, specifically Prescod-Weinstein's work on the politics of observation — who is permitted to look at the universe, who gets to name what they see, and who is allowed to remain visible within scientific and cultural narratives. In her book The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred (2021), Prescod-Weinstein argues that science is never neutral, that the questions we ask and the people we center in asking them carry political weight.
Piller builds that framework directly into her materials. Observation as political act. Visibility as a question of power. The cosmos not as neutral backdrop but as contested territory — and who gets to claim a place in it.
Victor Glover floating past the far side of the Moon on April 6. Augusta Savage fighting to study sculpture in Paris in 1923, denied a scholarship because of her race. Edmonia Lewis becoming the first professionally successful Black and Native American sculptor in American art history against every system designed to stop her. Octavia Butler imagining futures that science fiction had systematically refused to include Black women in.
These are not separate stories. They're the same story, playing out across different centuries and different kinds of space.
Stuart Hall's argument that how a culture represents itself is inseparable from power sits directly underneath this work. Piller's act of placing these figures at the center of cosmological structures is a curatorial argument and a political one. She's not illustrating history. She's insisting it stays present.
The Art Historical Lineage
The first thing I thought of when I walked in was Lee Bontecou. Those black voids, the dimensional pull of the wall pieces, the sense of something enormous and dark at the center of each structure. Bontecou was doing something radical in the early 1960s — making large-scale wall reliefs from salvaged canvas, wire, and industrial materials that seemed to breathe, that had an almost threatening physical presence. She stepped away from the spotlight for decades before being rediscovered, which is its own story about who the art world pays attention to and when.
Piller is working in that lineage and pushing it somewhere different. Where Bontecou's voids felt abstract and existential, Piller's voids contain history. They're not empty — they're full of faces, objects, fragments of lived experience.
There's also something here that connects to Eva Hesse — that commitment to materials as carriers of meaning, the willingness to let the process of making be visible in the finished object. Hesse believed in letting materials do unexpected things, in keeping the handmade quality present in the finished object. Piller's sewing and binding and layering carries that same logic. The hand is present throughout.
Robert Rauschenberg's combines are in there too — that idea of gathering everything, of letting disparate materials exist together and create meaning through proximity and collision. Rauschenberg wanted to work in the gap between art and life. Piller is working in the gap between history and erasure, between visibility and disappearance.
The most direct formal ancestor may be the Gee's Bend quilters — the multigenerational community of Black women in Wilcox County, Alabama, whose geometric, improvisational quilts were being made long before the art world decided, in 2002, that they were worth a museum retrospective. The quilts had been there all along. What changed was who was paying attention. That delay is its own version of the story Piller is telling — work that existed outside the frame of visibility, exerting force whether or not it was acknowledged.
From there, the feminist craft tradition follows as a parallel thread: what Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, and the Pattern and Decoration movement did in the 1970s to insist that sewing, mending, and binding carried the same weight as painting and sculpture. Piller's practice is in direct conversation with both histories, even as it extends them into explicitly political and cosmological territory.
The Painting
There's more painting in this show than Piller has done in a while, and it's doing something interesting in relation to the sculptural work. The painted surfaces appear within the assemblages and also as more distinct presences, and certain pieces seem to mirror each other across the room — works responding to each other like call and response.
It made the whole show feel more like a conversation than a collection of individual objects.
Who These Figures Are and Why It Matters
Edmonia Lewis was the first professionally successful Black and Native American sculptor in American art history. Augusta Savage was a sculptor and educator during the Harlem Renaissance who fought racial discrimination her entire career — denied a scholarship to study in Paris because of her race, she came back and built institutions for other artists instead. Octavia Butler transformed science fiction by centering Black women in futures that had systematically excluded them. Dred Scott's case tested whether Black Americans could claim citizenship and human rights under American law. Breonna Taylor was killed in her own home in 2020.
These are people who existed in systems designed to make them disappear. Piller builds entire cosmological structures around their images and refuses to let them recede.
In a moment when history is actively being revised and names are being removed from buildings and curriculum, this is not a passive gesture. It's a decision about what stays visible — and it rhymes with a crew that includes the first woman and first Black astronaut to travel beyond low Earth orbit, finally, fifty years later, in a mission named after a goddess.
Something to Sit With
Artemis II splashed down off San Diego last night. The crew traveled 695,081 miles. They saw the far side of the Moon, a solar eclipse from deep space, the Earth setting behind the lunar surface. They were farther from home than any humans since 1970.
And here in a gallery on Heliotrope in East Hollywood, Alicia Piller has built a universe out of abalone shell and factory paint and salvaged materials and the faces of people who were told they didn't belong in the frame — and she's hung them on the wall and called it Lost in Space and asked us to stand in it and feel what it means.
Both things are happening right now.
Alicia Piller: Lost in Space is on view at Track 16 Gallery, 706 Heliotrope Dr., Los Angeles, through May 9, 2026.
Kristine Schomaker (she/her) holds a BA in Art History and an MA in Studio Art from California State University, Northridge, where she studied under Betty Ann Brown and Samantha Fields. She is the founder and publisher of Art and Cake, a Los Angeles arts publication that has produced over 1,800 articles spotlighting artists and spaces overlooked by mainstream media, and writes regularly on Substack about practice, process, and the art world's exclusionary structures. She has taught art history at Antelope Valley College and Pasadena City College, and is a member of the College Art Association, the Southern California Women's Caucus for Art, and Art Table.
Her writing is grounded in a decade-plus of curatorial practice at Shoebox Projects and community organizing through Shoebox Arts, both based at the Brewery Artist Complex in Los Angeles. She writes from inside the community she covers — not as an outside observer, but as someone who has spent over 25 years building infrastructure for artists whose work deserves more attention than it gets.
