Following our latest online group show, we're doing Future Isms in real life, opening Thursday, March 2nd at Seattle's Glassbox Gallery.
A pared-down version of the online exhibition, the show includes photography and video work curated by Humble's co-founder Jon Feinstein. Art, literature, and pop culture have a legacy of positing sci-fi fantasies of the world to come, which often contain parallels to the uncertainties of the current social and political climate. This exhibition approaches these present day premonitions with a similarly precarious gaze. Some artists offer optimistic, utopian angles, others look at the present-future with a dystopian pessimism, and many offer a blurry hybrid. With work that ranges from eerily lit portraits to animated gifs and analog collage, the exhibition hinges on its curatorial ambiguity.
In his series Testament, Kris Graves makes portraits of Black American men and women, but gives them full control over their likeness by providing the agency to control the lighting aspects of their portraits, often with blue and magenta hues. The series gives hope to a reclaimed representation in spite of historical bias. Using an array of stock landscape photographs, Anastasia Samoylova creates fantastical, outer-space-like images that obscure visual media’s role in shaping how we experience the world. Taking a more traditional photographic approach, Niv Rozenberg makes straightforward, typological photographs of the rapidly transforming, and constant fluctuation of urban developments in Tel Aviv. Flipping the timeline, Jade Doskow looks to how the utopian future was perceived in the past. Her series Lost Utopias, captures the surreal, dreamlike structures of former World’s Fair sites as they exist today, often abandoned, or repurposed into the contemporary world.
These photographers and over a dozen other artists in the exhibition present a future that is murky and unsettling, and demonstrate how our attempts to represent it continue to shift shape and get closer to expiring into history.
Special thanks to media partner Photographic Center Northwest
Artists:
Anastasia Samoylova
Antone Dolezal
Azikiwe Mohammed
Antoine Bruy
Ben Alper
Caleb Charland
Daniel Temkin
Deepanjan Mukhopadhyay
Faith Holland
Griselda San Martin
Jade Doskow
Joe Rudko
Kris Graves
Matthew Schenning
Max Cleary
Niv Rozenberg
Orestes Gonzalez
Parsley Steinweiss
Rachel Sussman
Serrah Russell
Michael Marcelle
Cassandra Klos