Ten Futures

Ten Futures

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Ten Futures

Ten Futures

Fri, Dec 21 - Sun, Feb 24, 2019
  • Pittsburgh Cultural Trust
  • 937 Liberty
  • Ticket Prices
    Free

Opening Reception: Friday, December 21 6-9pm
Gallery Crawl: Friday, January 25 6-10pm

Wood Street Galleries and The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust are pleased to present Ten Futures, an exhibition featuring the work of Elaine Healy, Shohei Katayama, Summer Jade Leavitt, Adam Milner, Celeste Neuhaus, Paul Peng, Everest Pipkin & Loren Schmidt, Maybe Jairan Sadeghi, Centa Schumacher, and Bradley Weyandt. The exhibition was curated by Fred Blauth & Dave Zak and will be on view at 937 Gallery from December 21 2018 through February 24 2019. An opening reception will take place on Friday, December 21st from 6-9pm.

Ten Futures finds its theme perched between the science fiction genre and the futures unfolding around us in real time. Through drawings, photographs, video, sculptures, garments, short stories, and a video game, the artists in the exhibition daydream, fear for, and build their own imagined worlds.

Shohei Katayama, Bradley Weyandt and Elaine Healy examine the consequences of the materials we harvest, construct, and wear through their works. Katayama’s prophetic, heat reactant sculpture speaks to the fragility of nature and our relationship with it. Weyandt's surreal works borrow the shapes and designs of industrial materials and renders them useless by subverting their makeup. Healy’s garments play with paradox too by synthesizing fabrics with opposite practical purposes such as combining mesh with faux fur. These artists are chameleons and reflect what they see.

Everest Pipkin & Loren Schmidt let viewers into their environments by implementing one of the most used tropes associated with the sci-fi genre: they give their characters’ a quest. Their video game, Spiral House, turns inward by asking players to navigate the subconscious space and architecture of a crumbling dream. Paul Peng’s works pursue a more pictorial take on this quest by taking cues from experimental comics and furry cultures. His drawings render monster boys living their day-to-day lives in search for comfort in their own skin.

Summer Jade Leavitt, Adam Milner, and Maybe Jairan Sadeghi, also take their viewers on journeys but for different reasons. These three artists desperately travel through time to sync with a lover, save a dying planet, and build a home on the moon, brick by brick. Their artworks might be set in other places and times but their tales are love stories as much as they are fantasies.

Celeste Neuhaus and Centa Schumacher draw upon the sciences of the occult to create their image and sculpture based artworks. Neuhaus’s CANARY IN THE COAL MINE consists of seven structures that fluctuate between cauldrons, traps, and wombs. These works ensnare synthetic and natural materials that intertwine to question our relationship with symbols and signs on an alchemical level. Using her own experimental photography techniques, Schumacher’s lens-based work mashes up aesthetics of spirituality and religion.

The term science fiction can be defined simply be reversing the phrase: fiction based on science. As technology expands at an exponential rate, so does the imaginations of those using it. Issues of access, class, religion, race, gender, and sexuality become hardwired into the softwares and devices being made today. Are the scientists and designers of tomorrow creating these technologies with queer and non-binary people in mind? What about POCs? Women? Witches? Artists? Earth? The artists in Ten Futures use the sci-fi genre to make sense of, escape from, and question their own 21-century realities and the futures they hold.

Wed-Thur: 11-6pm; Fri-Sat: 11-8pm; Sun: 11-5pm

Accessibility:

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