SaltStar: Tyler Kline’s Sednacene Visions and the Time Ghost Mariner
April 25, 2025
In In Remembrance of Space Battleship Yamato and his broader Sednacene-themed work, Tyler Kline emerges as a speculative sculptor of futures we can barely imagine but urgently need. Now exhibited at the Gallery at the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, this body of cast bronze sculptures, funded by a Faculty Life Grant, is less a nostalgic glance at sci-fi mythology than a radical projection into the possible.
Drawing from the mythos of Space Battleship Yamato—a Japanese anime that itself mourns and mythologizes 20th-century warfare—Kline transforms memory into material. His bronze forms are not just artifacts; they are talismans, prototypes of faster-than-light vehicles imagined to navigate a universe ruled by fusion energy, quantum foam manipulation, and wave-function collapse. Here, consciousness is rendered non-computational, not the product of mechanical processes but a force capable of bending spacetime itself.
The pieces in the Sednacene cycle resist easy categorization. Their surfaces are rough, planetary, suggesting both the hand of the artist and the abrasion of interstellar travel. They are at once archaic and hyper-advanced, religious and scientific — relics from a future epoch Kline calls the Sednacene, an era beyond the Anthropocene and Chthulucene where survival depends on symbiosis, adaptation, and radical imagination.
Kline’s vision of interstellar locomotion is neither utopian nor dystopian; it is earnest, strange, and astonishingly specific. His speculative spacecraft operate not through brute force but through harmonizing with the deep structures of quantum reality — manipulating gravity at the Planck scale and riding the wavefronts of collapsed possibilities.
It is this conceptual daring that distinguishes Kline’s work from mere sci-fi homage. His sculptures demand a rethinking of materiality, technology, and human agency. The tactile density of cast bronze — a medium synonymous with permanence — grounds his otherwise speculative ideas, forcing us to confront the physical stakes of dreams too often dismissed as fantasy.
If there is a criticism to be made, it is that the ambition of Kline’s project can occasionally outpace its material resolution; certain pieces feel more like thought-experiments than fully realized forms. Yet this is a minor quibble. In a cultural moment saturated with nostalgia and fearful retreat, Kline’s work dares to dream forwards — messily, tenderly, and with ferocious intelligence.
In a future shaped by Kline’s vision, it is not domination that ensures survival, but radical entanglement: with other species, with technologies, and with the deeper fabric of the cosmos itself.
It is an exhilarating proposition.
