“It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.”
–Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986
Endings are always beginnings. As an ending begins, it nudges our sense of “now”toward some hazy, perpetual future. It’s a future with soft edges. The future rarely arrives abruptly. It’s a slow burn. We are carried into it fluidly while the shades and shapes of reality are altered around us.
This exhibition was an invitation for artists to speculate about the future and the potential worlds that are imagined through present-tense-endings. Artists were asked to think beyond any notion of the apocalyptic and instead reflect on how life will adapt to experiences of a new now, be that political, industrial, ecological, terrestrial, and so on. The response was overwhelmingly vast and varied. That so many artists are toying with these ideas should make us take notice. They are among our most important world-builders.
This selection of artwork reflects inventive themes ranging from hybridity, utopian ideals, AI abstractions, virtual reality, culturally specific futurisms, animal collaboration, science fiction, ancestral technologies, transcendence, and green experimentation. It’s a diverse group of makers that begin to imagine a new human order. And through this sort of speculation, we can make way for ideas that carry us and the ideas that get carried forward by us.
– Catherine Taft, Deputy Director & Curator at LAXART
