PRESS RELEASE 05/28/19
Future Ruins will run from June 08 — June 27 at California Institute of the Arts in tandem with the Summer Institute Art Residency.
Future Ruins examines our amnesiac present across international borders, featuring works from artists whose approach to figuration is of the moment while harkening back to classic modes of craft and pictorial representation. The artists in this show embrace painting and ceramic materials, incorporating elements of pop culture, sacred iconography, meme-language, and neo-medieval motif, translated through technical irreverence and dry humor. This iconology of “new figuration” appears as a response to consumerist digital media and as a condition of contemporary imagemaking.
Playful and cynical, bold and sensitive, these works celebrate inherent contradictions over absolutist binaries; their material processes evolve in stages over time, eschewing the “arms race of urgency” that has come to define the last half-decade. Collectively, such artifacts chronicle the rituals and behaviors of a 21st-century humanity, one for whom the collapse of space and time has established incompatible forces of sociality, undergirded by an omnipresent expectation to comply with corrupt democracy. As we navigate increasingly striated social bubbles, the responsibility of imagemaking assumes greater import; the weaponization of meme-media across established and emergent web platforms is too often recognized only after its consequences have played out in the “real life” political arena. All of this is unfolding against a backdrop of expanding AI, a technological evolution that asks us to relocate the human (hand, mind, and otherwise) in the act of making. What emerges from this maelstrom is sometimes absurd, often raucous, and invariably affective. There is no linear master narrative uniting the works in this show, rather a complimentary logic that cumulatively approaches something like meaning.
Future Ruins is on view Monday thru Friday by appointment:
info@futures.cx
Opening reception: Sat June 08, 3-6pm
Closing reception: Thur June 27, 5-9pm
California Institute of the Arts,
John Baldessari Studio (JBS)
24700 McBean Pkwy, Valencia
Featured artists: Apollinaria Broche; Richie Culver; Luke Forsyth; Martin Paaskesen; Aparna Sarkar; Mateusz Sarzynski; Paige Valentine; Sam Wagner; Taylor A. White; Ji Hyun Won; Maryam Yousif; Suzanna Zak.
Organized by research studio Bakersfield™ in support of CalArts Summer Institute.
More info: http://futures.cx/
