Artists contemplate life on Mars in Scottsdale museum exhibition

Billionaires remain obsessed with colonizing Mars and humanity seems fascinated with the potential of leaving our planet behind rather than cherishing the Earth we have. Yet science widely acknowledges that terraforming an uninhabitable planet like Mars is unachievable, and that alternate solar systems holding a potential “Earth 2.0” are beyond human reach.

In Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art's current exhibition “Life on Mars,” on view through Sept. 14, artists Erika Lynne Hanson and Steven J. Yazzie explore our own planet in work that is both familiar and otherworldly. Through photography, textiles, ceramics, videos and painting, these two artists have created an exhibition that resonates with mysterious earth energy and takes inspiration from the desert landscape to reframe how we view our connection to our planet.

“A few years ago, I started reading a lot of books about ways of thinking about the world from a non-human centric perspective, and Indigenous ideas around kinship with the land. Initially I was putting together a much larger show,” says SMoCA curator Lauren R. O’Connell. Yet, after discussions with artists Hanson and Yazzie, who had never met before, O’Connell saw a connection between their work and asked them if they would create all-new pieces for this show.

“They both really look at the nuances from a world history or a spiritual perspective,” O’Connell says. “Their color palettes just vibe — they both work in different mediums but explore similar things from different perspectives. They had never met before, but as soon as they started talking, they hit the ground running.”


Several years ago, O'Connell and Hanson were talking about Hanson's work.

"We got on the topic of terraforming Mars, and how it’s impossible — scientists know that.” O’Connell says. “Even NASA, if you go to their website, there’s a statement along the lines of, the likelihood of terraforming an Earth 2.0 is pretty much impossible. Even if there’s a galaxy out there, and we could get our telescopes to see it, we could never reach it. Despite this, we continue to allocate our tax dollars into space exploration and ideas of not just extraterrestrial life, but how humans could exist in a space outside of Earth.”

Glamorizing outer space is nothing new. Since humanity’s infancy as a species, we have looked to the skies with wonder. And since the beginnings of the space race in the 1950s, cosmic themes have informed pop culture and human history.

As an otherworldly glam rocker and inspiration for the title of the show, David Bowie often embodied extraterrestrial roles, such as in the film “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” in which he plays an alien, as well as in his genderfluid persona Ziggy Stardust. In his 1971 hit song “Life on Mars,” Bowie speculates about life on other planets, all the while singing with haunting power about human struggles

Artist Steven J. Yazzie shares in his artist statement, “The reference to David Bowie’s song intrigues me because the themes in the song are layered with enigmatic longing for escape beyond our world. I think many of the song’s themes are reflected in the exhibition’s exploration of our connection to land, the passage of time and the material and abstract elements that shape our existence.”

Artist Hanson says the exhibition "prompts us to pay close attention to things on Earth that evoke the same sense of otherworldly wonder, inquiry or mystery as Mars or any extraterrestrial space.”

Indeed, the result of these two artists collaborating around the same themes is a visual feast of sacred landscapes both woven with intricate threads in Hanson’s colorful textiles, and filmed in dizzying kaleidoscopic detail by Yazzie. Volcanic rock spills purposefully out onto the floor of the gallery, surrounding organic ceramic vessels hand-made by Yazzie, which echo pings of sound that emerge and reverberate through the space.

Yazzie ended up finding out through the creative process that the supplier he got the volcanic rock from is the same source that supplies NASA with it to test out their space rovers. Hanson also has a passion for rocks, aiming to “call attention to lesser-known things that we live with, such as decorative landscape rock.” Often, these rocks we take for granted from our front yard have been processed by the earth for millennia, holding memory and significance.


In a stunning large-scale triptych painting by Yazzie hanging on the far wall of the gallery, a landscape roils with streaks of startling colors: purples, blues, vivid poison greens and the pinks, reds and ochres of a desert scene captivate the viewer. In the middle of mountains and canyons, a cavernous pit looms out of the painting, generating in viewers a sense of the unfathomable heart of our planet.

“Oftentimes, we look at landscapes through photography, which is just one moment in time. A lot of landscape photographers go back to the same places to document them, because a landscape is never fixed. It has all different ecosystems, natural disasters, growth,” O’Connell says. “Steven wants to show a landscape through all these things, but also through cultural history or trauma that is carried with the land. The way Steven describes it in his painting is ‘abstraction as a resistance of the absolute.’”

Leaving the exhibition and stepping back out into the desert landscape of Arizona, everything feels a bit more otherworldly and also precious. After all, if Earth is the only home we have, a question posed by the exhibition lingers: “Instead of attempting to flee environmental decline through solutions shaped by our imaginations, what would happen if humanity reimagined the potential of Earth?”