Strange scenes of forensic-like activity glowed like so many moons in Demetrius Oliver’s first New York solo exhibition, which turned D’Amelio Terras’s gallery into the titular Observatory. In a series of square photographs featuring fish-eyed images framed by dense, planetary darkness, the formerly Houston-based conceptual artist is shown in his studio engaged in seemingly exploratory maneuvers. In one, Oliver balances on a ladder holding up a kerosene lantern, illumining an empty corner; in another, he probes a fireplace with a fire stoker, shifting about the tumble of illuminated lamps that fill its recesses. In some images the artist is absent and here, clues to human (perhaps alien) presence abound: electrical cords snake across the floor; shovels and pick axes are laid out neatly in front of a fireplace; a meteor-like fragment sits silently on a dark red carpet (the same sparkly fragment sits disconcertingly near you on the polished white floor of the gallery).

In each of these images, the camera that took it (often in the tarnished silver reflection of a tea kettle) is front and center, eyeing you as you eye it, contributing to a discomfiting hall of mirrors effect. Adding to this surreal space-like milieu is a series of stacked white plastic buckets laid out on their side that streak across the gallery floor like the blur of a shooting star (or a telescope, as the title suggests). Projected into the bottom of the first is a slide show of a crashing wave rotating in a circle, its cresting white foam evoking the pale pebbled surface of a moon. On a far wall, a video of an actual spinning moon (from a drawing by Galileo) is screened as well, over which John Coltrane’s Intersteller Space album plays dreamily.

In the past, Oliver has consistently mined the history of American literature and race relations (William Faulkner, Emmett Till) for works that conflate identity politics with conceptual art practices like performance, photo-documentation and videos of odd, isolated acts. In these new works, however, Bruce Nauman’s body-in-the-studio investigations are a clear precursor, as is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, at solitary work in his basement room, cut off from the chaotic injustice of the world outside. And, in a nice postmodern turn, Jeff Wall’s famous portrait of Ellison’s hero is also evoked by the many light bulbs populating Oliver’s images.

But the artist’s new attention toward the cosmos recalls something else as well: a more recent movement among artists of color—Simone Leigh and Olalekan B. Jeyifous, among others—who are using tropes of science fiction to critique contemporary race and identity issues or create utopian worlds in which they are not at play. In the literary world, similar work by esteemed writers like the late Octavia Butler has long been coined speculative fiction—a designation that might also be applied to Oliver’s new body of work. His man-in-the-moon (or man-in-the-studio) character is nothing if not a speculator. Sequestered off in Other worlds that weirdly mirror our own, he displays all the signs of a pioneer: testing, probing and longing for the new, whatever, and wherever, that might be.

Quinn Latimer is a poet and art critic based in New York and Basel, Switzerland. Her poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Boston Review and Prairie Schooner, among other journals, and her art and literary reviews regularly appear in Modern Painters, where she is an associate editor.