Washington City Paper

Arresting Art: Unforeseen at VisArts

By Stephanie Rudig

July 9, 2025

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is a site designed to safely store radioactive waste in underground caverns. In 1993, researchers at the Sandia National Laboratories explored the idea of warning messages that could be understood by people living several millennia from now. Though those alerts have yet to be posted at the site, the “Sandia message” serves as a point of inspiration for artists Chris Combs and Ceci Cole McInturff’s multimedia exhibit Unforeseen.

Projections of video footage taken from around the U.S. over the course of a decade dance across the room, providing an eerie illumination for the sculptural installations and wall hangings. The work can’t be taken in all at once, the viewer must wait for dancing projector light to pass over and clarify what is on display. A metallic orb sits at the center of the room, surrounded by hybrid sculptures made of branches, deer hooves, and antlers hanging from the ceiling above and phrases from the oddly poetic Sandia message on the walls. Among these evocative lines is, “What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger,” forcing the viewer to imagine what exactly happened in this space, and who allowed this danger to come to pass.

Combs frequently works with technology and video, hacking electronics and circuit boards to push them beyond their intended uses, and Cole McInturff usually traffics in organic materials for her sculptures; the collaboration between the pair yields a potent of urban and man-made objects colliding with the natural world that explore what our planet is coming to, what will remain, and how it will be remembered.

Unforeseen runs through July 20 at VisArts, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville. Wednesday and Thursday, noon to 4 p.m.; Friday, noon to 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. visartscenter.org. Free.

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