Dario Robleto: The Signal

Dario Robleto: The Signal features the artist’s feature-length film Ancient Beacons Long for Notice (2024) and a selection of artworks that relate to his dazzlingly inventive mining of the history of science and technology. The film will be continuously projected in an enclosed space in the McCormick Gallery and will be shown alongside a selection of artworks. These will show his engagement with the problem of how humans leave traces of themselves, whether as sound recordings of voices, electrocardiograms and electroencephalograms, or as junk, and how these remainders fail to capture all the richness of what it means to be in love, worried, much less the textures of our emotional lives.

The commission of the film by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art was underwritten by Sheila Wald and Bill Pierce, The Museum Contemporaries, and an anonymous donor. The film is also made possible in part by the VIA Art Fund.  This exhibition’s realization at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art has been supported with gifts from the SBMA Women’s Board, Resonance Foundation, Jill and John C. Bishop Jr., Martha Gabbert, Susan D. Bowey, and Jacquelyn Klein-Brown.

This commission and exhibition were co-organized with the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas.