Spanning three windows of Rice University’s Fondren Library, Sharmistha Ray’s Entangled Portals is a vinyl installation that evokes the visual language of stained glass to explore communication transcending visible and invisible realms. While researching at the university, the artist encountered the Archives of the Impossible (AOTI), a rare collection of documents, recordings, and images related to UFO sightings, alien encounters, and unexplained aerial phenomena. Founded by religious studies scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal and housed at the Woodson Research Center in Fondren Library, AOTI preserves accounts of extraordinary experiences that expand the frontiers of knowledge.

The imagery in Entangled Portals investigates the recurring appearance of abstract symbols, geometric forms, and enigmatic diagrams found in the archive: sacred shapes, symbols, and mathematical patterns that appear across cultures, spiritual traditions, and historical epochs. The project also intersects with Ray’s longstanding interest in experiences of alienness and belonging. As a queer, nonbinary immigrant whose life has unfolded across multiple cultures and geographies, they are drawn to figures and narratives that exist at the edges of legibility. The alien, in this sense, becomes more than an extraterrestrial presence; emerging as a metaphor for inhabiting multiple worlds at once and for occupying identities that challenge fixed categories of selfhood, gender, nation, and history.

By illuminating these forms through colored light, Entangled Portals proposes that mathematics, geometry, and pattern are part of a universal language, one capable of traversing species, cultural dimensions, and worlds. The work imagines communication as an act of cosmic entanglement, inviting viewers to consider how our shared place within the universe might be expressed through symbols, light, and perception. Rather than treating difference as distance, this installation asks whether estrangement itself might be a form of connection, a way of recognizing ourselves within a larger cosmos populated by intelligences, histories, and possibilities beyond our own.

Platform: Sharmistha Ray, Entangled Portals is organized by Noor Alé, Associate Curator at the Moody Center for the Arts, in partnership with the Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University. The Platform series is made possible by the Moody Center for the Arts Founders Circle. 

Celebrate the opening of this work on October 22, 2026, with a special performance by dancer Jasmine Hearn and vocalist jonh r. stronks. 

About the artist
Sharmistha Ray is a visual artist and the Estella Loomis McCandless Associate Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Holding an MFA in Painting and MS in Theory, Criticism, and History of Art, Design, and Architecture from Pratt Institute and a BA from Williams College, Ray has executed major public projects and written prolifically on critical and theoretical frameworks in contemporary art practice for leading publications. Ray is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell MFA Grant, Montblanc Young Artist Worldwide Patronage Award, and TED Fellowship, and has been an artist-in-residence at Surf Point, York, ME; Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY; Fire Island Artist Residency, Fire Island, NY; and Art Cake, Brooklyn, NY.  In addition to their solo work, they co-founded the spiritualist feminist art collective Hilma’s Ghost, which acts as a collaborative model for research, artistic production, pedagogy, and community.

Ray and the collective’s work have been featured internationally at Guggenheim New York, NY; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, Arizona; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA; The Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY; Galería RGR, Mexico City; Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT; Secrist|Beach, Chicago, IL; The Shepherd, Detroit, MI; Pen + Brush, New York, NY; Kent State University, Kent, OH; Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens, NY; The Parallax Center, Portland, OR; The Armory Show, New York, NY; Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, NY; Nature Morte, New Delhi, India; and others. Public art projects and commissions include works at Grand Central Station, New York, NY, and Pittsburgh International Airport, Pittsburgh, PA.