Atlanta artist Fabian Williams opens the doors this week on what might be his most ambitious project yet. “Mothership Sirius B: What It Was, What It Is, and What It’s Gon’ Be,” a three-story immersive installation from Williams, a.k.a. Occasional Superstar, and his wife and creative partner, Sindy Guerrero-Williams, opens Aug. 13 at 12 Jackson Street SE.
“Mothership” features movie posters Williams reimagined using lenticular printing; the images shift depending on the angle viewed from. Here, that means each poster flips between a rendering of the film’s original art and Williams’s reworked version, revealing what he sees as the real message underneath the movie’s story and imagery. Williams designed the posters digitally, then worked with a lenticular print shop in New York City to produce them. The show marks something of a turn for Williams, who’s primarily known as a painter and muralist. It’s a more layered, multimedia take on ideas about media, messaging, and imagining the future that have run through his work for years.
The show, which includes more than 50 works, traces how decades of science fiction shaped today’s world, then asks visitors to help imagine something else. Williams made 46 of the pieces, then collaborated with local artists and students on the rest.
The installation, he says, takes its name from the Dogon people of Mali, who documented the Sirius star system centuries ago. Williams frames the whole installation through a single conceit: an alien scout, sent to study Earth the way an anthropologist might, compiles a record of mid-century America through the 2000s. Each floor of “Mothership Sirius B,” in that telling, is a page from that alien archive. Science fiction read back as evidence of what 20th century humanity feared, built and became.
Floor 1: Fears of our grandparents
The ground floor of “Mothership” recreates the Americana of midcentury science fiction, including mint green walls, checkered floors, red vinyl seating, and reworked posters for “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Planet of the Apes” and “Soylent Green.” The choice of movie posters included is deliberate. Those films, in particular, Williams says, served as code for the racial paranoia, institutional collapse and the weaponization of science of the times.
Floor 2: The sci-fi that predicted now
Climbing to the second floor, the lighting drops and the palette shifts. An ’80s corridor pulls from lenticular reworkings of “RoboCop,” “They Live,” “Back to the Future” and “Blade Runner,” among other films Williams frames as predicting the privatization of public life. The 1990s section turns to “The Matrix,” reimagined in a lenticular print titled “Malcolm Morpheus: Matrix Version v.68,” shifting between the film’s Morpheus — palms open, red and blue pills in hand — and Malcolm X in the same pose. Malcolm X “offered society the red pill of hard truths,” the accompanying text explains. A 2000s section built around mirrored walls reflects a culture watched, tracked and monetized even as it obsesses over its own image.
On the same floor, a staged kitchen holds a food installation, shelves and counters stacked with the boxes and cans of shelf-stable foods that defined ’80s and ’90s pantries, a domestic counterpoint to the dystopian films on the surrounding walls. Nearby, a side-table shaped like an oversized prescription pill bottle takes aim at the opioid crisis, singling out OxyContin by name.
The climb from Floor 2 to Floor 3 signals the exhibit’s deliberate turn from reimagining the past to predicting the future. The stairwell is lined with original illustrations by students from Morgan Oliver School, Maynard Jackson High School and Georgia Tech, each imagining the Atlanta they want to live in at age 21.
Floor 3: Building something else
Visitors reach the top floor at an altar: an oversized painting of Black Jesus, rendered in gold leaf, hangs above a row of flickering candles. The image recurs throughout the third-floor hallway, where depictions of Jesus by Williams and other artists in various styles and sizes hang.
The first room off that hallway, the Garden of Jza, holds collages that mark a real departure from Williams’ usual style: civil rights figures — among them Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X — paired with their spouses, floating through peaceful landscapes in vintage cars. The room also holds representations of Jza herself, Williams’ name for the divine feminine. At its center is “The First Cookout,” a large-scale reimagining of “The Last Supper” hosted by Jza alongside 13 contemporary figures, including Michelle Obama, Malala Yousafzai, Dolores Huerta, Li Tingting and Mari Copeny.
Next door, the Future Lab is a lounge-style think tank with bean bag seating, curated music and a black-lit “aether room.” It’s also interactive. Visitors are invited to leave behind their own hopes and prayers for the future on sticky notes.
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“Atlanta has always built the future from the rubble of what others tried to dictate,” Williams said in a statement announcing the show. “Mothership Sirius B is our proof of concept — an invitation to the whole country to stop inheriting someone else’s vision and start authoring our own. We still have a voice in how this world gets built. Plan your future, or the future will be planned for you.”
“Mothership Sirius B” opens to the public Aug. 13, with ongoing hours Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Opening night tickets are available through isawmothership.com. The exhibition is presented by Occasional Superstar with support from the City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, Satellite Collective and Dashboard Co-op.
