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This is the Future before it Happened concludes two years worth of artist residencies and exchanges sponsored by Outpost for Contemporary Art. Over half of the included artists are presenting new work developed during their residencies in Los Angeles or while on exchange in Kyiv, Ukraine. This exhibition is an opportunity to bring this work together alongside that of other artists whose work enhances the exhibition's themes. Over the last two years, Outpost has worked with numerous Eastern European artists who are challenging official histories, reclaiming forgotten pasts, evoking future possibilities, and asserting an aspiration and ability to affect positive social change in order to complicate the paths of progress claimed by their governments. Inspired by this critical stance, this exhibition plays with the fixity of time and how one moves through it. Rather than thinking of time as a linear progression, the title suggests an elliptical oscillation that allows mental projections from the present to the past and into the future in a start-and-stop dynamic. Several works in the show reject the blind forward march of nationalism, something that inarguably inhibits creativity and restricts the ways in which people process change, in favor of critical reflection of the past. Veaceslav Druta's (b. Moldova; lives in Paris) new video Moldova, Summer 2007, sharply depicts post-Soviet politics at work in Moldova today by simply framing a found absurdist scene of a Soviet-era warplane parked in the street and blocking pedestrian traffic. In a project titled You cannot glue parts of an exploding grenade to the place it fell, Nebojsa Milikic (b. former Yugoslavia; live is Belgrade) attempts to assemble razor-sharp pieces of twisted shrapnel (collected after the NATO bombings of Belgrade in 1999) into a single object in order to reformulate Max Ernst's statement, "You cannot glue parts of an exploding grenade together," for today's cultural and technological realities. Ukrainian artist team, Yuliya Kostevera + Yuriy Kruchak, (b Ukraine; live in Kyiv) present three pairs of untitled photographs of chairs before and after they have been repaired. Hidden in the work's dry objectivity is optimism for the future. The work metaphorically speaks to a past that is constantly in a process of renewal. If the past can be continually reconfigured into something new or different, then the future is an empty table waiting to be set. Also constituting a break from the past, Tim Hyde's (b. US; lives in Brooklyn) photo collages furnish 20th century monumental sculpture with a weightless sense of possibility. The "monument" in this work is comprised of light, wind, chance, a physical gesture, and a single 4x8 sheet of construction foam. The singular photographic moment in this work breaks into explosions of spatial planes that visually disrupt the space-time continuum. Jeff Cain's (b. U.S.; lives in Los Angeles) sculpture is inspired by Ukraine's strong influence on Constructivism and the Constructivist interest in using art as a radical forward-looking force that could actively shape the future of a nation. Cain's sculpture, based on Constructivist Gustav Klucis's semi-portable multimedia agitprop kiosks circa 1922, is interested in restoring present-day cultural connections to this historic movement. The physical and psychological signs of a society in transition are captured in Adam Frelin's (b. U.S.; lives in Albany) video called The Faction, which offers a compelling visual tour through old and new Kyiv but also a penetrative way to absorb present-day experience in Kyiv. The untranslatable quality of recent political events in Kyiv became the subject in Angie Waller's (b. U.S.; lives in New York City) installation of morphed and applied photo and video documents. Combining fragments of historical souvenirs with web clips of censored political events of the present, Waller's installation illustrates the endless cycle of tension between the past and the future. Throughout world politics, fundamental changes are promised and then not delivered and in this protracted space disillusionment sets in. Vlatka Horvat's (b. Croatia; lives in New York City) video Left to Right and Back expresses the idea of mobility without ability through the simple repeated action of a blinded subject in a box. Similarly,Tom Dale's (b. UK; lives in London) sculpture, Remote Control, humorously expresses life's back and forth narrative through a collection of 4' high picket signs, each hand-painted with different remote control symbols -- fast forward, rewind, pause and play. Counteracting this more cynical view of life is a small photograph also by Tom Dale called The Back of Beyond, which beautifully captures how the present directly affects the future from one moment to the next. Titled after the Brian O'Nolan novel, The Third Policeman, Krysten Cunningham's (b. US; lives in Los Angeles) sculpture explores time's metaphysical properties -- particularly the sense that time is either moving or standing still. The work's primary form suggests two bicycle wheels, positioned as if they are in orbit. The sense of motion, however, is contradicted by the static way the wheels are fixed into place, atop a thin metal pole, unable to touch the ground and generate any motion. Coral Reef, by Maarten Vanden Eynde (b. Belgium; currently based in Rotterdam), exhibited here as a model for a long-term project, is a multi-layered work that uses a floating landfill as a jumping-off point. Presented in this exhibition is a small sample of the artist's larger work, accompanied by sketches and plans of the entire adventure. Posing as a remnant of a forgotten past, the piece exhibits this present-day phenomenon as if it were a moment frozen in time. And, finally, in a return to the state of uncertainty where all things begin and end, Olexander Gnilitsy's (b. Ukraine; lives in Munich and Kyiv) singular painting is based on a photograph the artist took through a moving car's windshield upon entering the 110-freeway tunnel toward Pasadena. Though based in the artist's experience of a certain place at a certain time, the painting has an ethereal quality, and the tunnel takes on a mystical reading that suggests travel toward something unknowable. For images or more details about this exhibition, please visit www.outpost-art.org. or contact Julie Deamer, Director, Outpost for Contemporary Art, at (323) 899-3533 or info@outpost-art.org --- To learn how to become a member of Outpost, please visit here. Outpost's Board of Directors are Julie Deamer (Founding Director), Jordan Biren (President), Amy Pederson (Vice-President), Maureen Branley (Treasurer), Rachel Allen, David Bloom, Gary Cannone, and Jeremy Rosenberg. Outpost for Contemporary Art |
