Carrie Hott’s latest exhibition, titled “years ago,” was inspired by a three-month residency at the UC Davis Center for Spaceflight Research where Hott accessed ongoing research into sustaining human life in outer space. The resulting presentation, leveraging the gallery’s stark setting, feels like a stage set awaiting the arrival of the actors. An array of props resemble nothing so much as an office for making time, whether in outer space or in their technological home base. Accessible by a single door, “years ago” is a tableau where, at any moment, the performers might return.

In “The Theater of Exhibitions” (Sternberg Press, 2007), Curator Jens Hoffman describes an exhibition as a stage “in which the objects on view are performers.” In this regard, it isn’t long before Hott’s presumably passive objects begin to indicate expansive extraterrestrial activity. A long, narrow worktable, collaged with the faces of clocks, grids, rulers, cellphone outlines, and circles, is situated diagonally in the room. Strategically placed coffee mugs sit on its surface and on the floor near its legs. The office variety mugs are empty and clean, and their innocuous and familiar presence adds to the overall sense that they are activated in a performance. Aside from the mugs, installed objects are predominantly black and white and formed entirely of right angles. A digital clock leans against the far end of the table, counting the hours, minutes, and seconds in military time. Handwritten pages of notes also lie on the table alongside a circular, deconstructed analog clock.

A rotated HD screen, resting on additional ceramic coffee mugs, is set lengthwise on a wall at the far corner of the room. The face of the screen bears a numeric pad, a call button, and a time stamp reminiscent of an iPhone interface. An aerial view of the same central table lurks in the screen’s background, rotating almost imperceptibly, in the manner of a clock hand. 

Leaning against the wall at the opposite corner is another television monitor. This one is also propped atop coffee mugs. Behind it, wallpaper depicting a satellite view of the blue Earth, showing electrical patterns, land, and water. The arc of a horizon line divides the terrestrial atmosphere from outer space. This horizontal screen is otherwise peppered with variously-sized square windows featuring photos and screen shots from Hott’s photo library, often capturing subjects or questions she looked up over the last few years. This monitor thus feels like a view into an active workspace, parallel to the work table but no less performative. Text boxes flash up intermittently with prompts — “how many satellites are there” for instance — that actively overlay changing elements, like a scrolling feed about GPS time dilation. 

At one point a video with piano accompaniment fills the room as a window with “Starlink’s Satellite Proliferation” infographic models the Earth’s satellite activity. The Earth diagram turns from blue in 2022 to red in 2024. A page of text reads, “Smell of space?” Another screen enlarges, as though clicked open, to show an aerial view of the pale human hands of a senior citizen performing an instructional video on how to make clocks. The accompanying human voiceover, casually encouraging use of DIY tools like staple guns and thrift shop materials, echoes throughout the gallery. It could be a YouTube video streaming from the heavens. One imagines that every object and surface in this room is not only conducting its own counting process but is doing so by satellite. Look away from the screen even for a moment and something will have changed by the time you look back. In this case, a sans-serif text box on the horizontal screen writes, “how do snails see.”

Hott describes finding a collection of milk snails hibernating in Mountain View, near the Googleplex: “I felt like an outsider, and they were also outsiders … Amid the military-techno-optimization giants, these snails felt like inspiring, insistent interlopers.” Milk snails (Otala lactea), considered an invasive species in California, have a longstanding connection to human culture, appearing in the ancient Roman annals of Pliny the Elder, who proffered advice on how to raise and harvest them for sustenance. In this case, the specter of Hott’s snail question conjures a hyper-terrestrial time register that reaches back to the beginnings of human civilization. Its slow, horizontal priority is thus a welcome antidote to our chronometric angst. And so, in “years ago,” one waits to see if the milk snail will, like Godot, show up at last.