Future Isms I Curated by Jon Feinstein

March 2 - April 15 opening March 2 | 7 - 10 pm

Glassbox Gallery is proud to present Future Isms, an exhibition of photography and video work curated by 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.

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 Rosenberg Orestes Gonzalez Parsley Steinweiss Rachel Sussman Serrah Russell Michael Marcelle Cassandra Klos

Image: Courtesy of Ben Alper/ The Archival Impulse