Dear Future…
Dear Future…
University of Northern Colorado Campus Commons Gallery
1051 22nd Street, Greeley, CO 80639
August 20-December 7, 2020
Review by Jillian Blackwell
Dear Future… at University of Northern Colorado’s Campus Commons Gallery exhibits the work of artists Jessica Houston, Ariel René Jackson, Jen Liu, and Sherwin Rio. Entering the dark and gloomy gallery space located off of a student commons area devoid of students due to a global pandemic, the space evokes an eerie and somber feeling, though perhaps not for the reasons originally intended.
Given that all but one of the pieces were made prior to 2020, I could not help but question the artists’ vision in light of the tumultuous, unsettling year we are living through. The artists speak to technology, a culture of industry and work, and the disastrous effects of climate change—all heavy subject matter. Yet, how could they have foreseen the heaviness of the immediate future? An immediate future in which a global pandemic has completely changed the ways we function and interact? A global pandemic that has changed how we view art?
In times like these, art isn’t just contextualized by current events, it’s in competition with them. Before we can deal with the content of an artwork, it must first square off with the pandemic. In a time when our society is dealing with unimaginable death, fear, and uncertainty, these artworks attempt sobriety but, in light of the pandemic, do not quite strike the serious tone the artists hoped for. Viewing the show becomes a battle of trying to forget the present—wearing a mask, sanitizing headphones between every listener, adhering to strict occupancy limits in the gallery space, the signage of which was prominently displayed—and attempting to connect with ideas of the future that had been created in the past.
Ariel René Jackson and Michael J. Love, The Future Is a Constant Wake, 2019, 6:12 minute video. Image by Jillian Blackwell.
The Future Is a Constant Wake is a collaborative video by Ariel René Jackson and Michael J. Love, who choreographed the movement for the video. The work is projected on the large back wall of the gallery space and the piece dominates the room. Love’s bare feet and hands brush through brown dirt, a hand in a blue nitrile glove brushes off bones, and a female voice recites a complex poem. In the poem, a collective “we” interacts with concepts of narrative, connection to the land, technology, and respect.
The artwork grasps for gravitas, but the impenetrability of the text makes it hard to enter the piece. The most moving portion of the six minute and twelve second work comes when the voice repeats “to be” over and over two thirds of the way through. Although the poem attempts to critique the present-day “we” as it looks to the future, it is the repetition of the phrase “to be” that more effectively and succinctly captures that future possibility while conveying futility.
Jen Liu, New Dawn Fades (Redux 2020), 5:13 minute two-channel video. Image by Jillian Blackwell.
In a similarly negative picture of the future, Jen Liu’s video New Dawn Fades, made in 2008 and recreated for the exhibition, rehashes dystopian ideas of the future. Two videos are projected on two walls of the small viewing space. The videos present two classes from a reorganized future society—the Crunch Division and the Peace Division. The people of the Crunch Division wear strange uniforms and do peculiar, regimented exercises to the blinking and buzzing of a red light. The people of the Peace Division sit and lay on the ground lackadaisically in empty hallways and rooms, and sip water out of extremely long straws. While the dystopian imagery is perhaps meant to intrigue through its strangeness, it led me to wonder why our projections of the future are so consistently dark—to the point that Liu’s work feels like nothing new.
Jessica Houston, Time Capsule Emerged, 3023, archival pigmented print. Image courtesy of Jessica Houston.
The only non-video work is a project by Jessica Houston, Letters to the Future, from which the exhibition derives its name. Houston asked experts across disciplines, from ecologists to composers, to write letters to an imagined future. These twenty-two letters were sealed in a time capsule that was then deployed into a glacier in 2019 and is expected to resurface in approximately a thousand years. The gallery viewer can put on headphones and listen to a selection of the letters read by their authors.
This artwork brings up such questions as what would one say to a future audience a thousand years from now? What is salient about our time to recount to that future audience, if anything at all? As I listened to the letters being read, I found many of them flowery and mundane, depicting daily tasks. Would a future reader care about our daily lives? One scientist decided that his letter would be an excerpt of his book about time. Will scientists a thousand years from now find the scientific discoveries of today to be trivial or ill-conceived? Or maybe they will treasure the insight, as we would treasure a letter from Galileo. A thousand years from now is a long time, and it is difficult to even conceive of how such a world would relate to our own. Houston takes the idea of a time capsule and attempts to elevate it to the level of conceptual art, and I’m not sure if it hits its mark. Does embedding the work in a glacier and increasing the time span until the reopening of the capsule translate into “art”?
Sherwin Rio, WITH WIND, COME WHAT MAY, 2020, installation and video on a 4 minute loop. The text reads “A billowy advice swelling up with the knowledge and wisdom.” Image by Jillian Blackwell.
The most uplifting work in Dear Future… is WITH WIND, COME WHAT MAY by Sherwin Rio—the only work that was made in 2020 (though whether it was made before or after the pandemic hit the U.S. is unclear). The viewing room is cloaked on all four sides by simple white curtains. Two identical, cheap, white fans stand in either corner, blowing directly on the viewer. On the main wall the curtains are pushed open to flank the video, which depicts white curtains like the ones in the installation blowing in front of a window in Rio’s apartment in San Francisco.
At the bottom of the video are words of advice, proverbial in nature, which speak of “resolve in determination while also acknowledging that which is out of our hands,” as described in Rio’s statement about the piece. Such words of wisdom found open reception from this mask-clad visitor, and the artwork’s lack of contrivance was refreshing. The unsophisticated video and installation speak most directly to pandemic times, in which we must bend but not break. The genuine approach stood in contrast to the attempted gravity of the other pieces.
Depictions of the future often end up being more a reflection of the times than anything else. These four works present matters that we worry about today: climate change, how we function as a society, and how we relate and retell our own histories. However, it is a hard task to speak to the future, especially when the present is screaming in your face. Just as the murmurations of Jackson’s The Future is a Constant Wake permeate the gallery, the specter of the virus hangs over any ideation of the future.
Jillian Blackwell is a Denver-based artist and art educator. She holds a BA in Fine Arts with a Concentration in Ceramics from the University of Pennsylvania.
