For its debut at NADA New York, NARANJO 141 is pleased to present a new series of works by New York-based artist Pauline Shaw (b. 1988), continuing her exploration of how experience and understanding are constructed, and the systems that shape them. Our booth (A108) is part of this year’s TD Bank Curated Spotlight section, organized by curator Owen Duffy.

Known for her large-scale felted wool works, Pauline Shaw uses structured processes across mediums—glass, metal, and textiles—to create landscapes that evoke the wonder of human experience. Through her research-driven practice, Shaw explores the fluidity of belief systems, the enigma of the natural world, and the complexities of scientific inquiry, questioning the ways in which we construct meaning and narrative through both perception and imagination.

In this new body of work, Shaw focuses on the collaborative process behind NASA’s outer space imagery. Raw images and data from the Junocam are made publicly available on NASA’s website, where citizen-scientists interpret the data to create the colorful representations of the cosmos that are then consumed by the public. Drawing inspiration from the swirling, marbled color maps of Jupiter and its moons, Shaw channels the awe and wonder that characterize how we represent the sublime. Gaseous currents become painterly gestures, wavelengths and rays transform into vibrant streaks of color, and the cracks marking the moon Europa are reimagined as inset silk “scars.”

The belief that three of Jupiter’s 95 moons may be the most likely sites for human colonization makes them a powerful vehicle for imagination. In Italo Calvino’s 1965 The Distance of the Moon, the moon is within arm’s reach of the Earth, offering a poetic love story. Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 Vaster than Empires and More Slow tells of an empathic encounter with a distant, sentient forest world. Within these literary contexts, Shaw’s work speaks to the impulse to grasp earthly elements when depicting even the most fantastical worlds. The craft of storytelling shapes our sense of reality. By synthesizing disparate fragments into holistic imagery, Shaw reconsiders these representations of space as reflections of our attitudes toward desire and perception.

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