Credit: Jer Thorp, Hope/Crisis, 2011, screenprint. SAG2017.01.16
Future Memoria
In Future Memoria, selections from Gallery’s permanent collection, along with loaned artworks from artists addressing the future in their own practice, embody both dystopian and utopian ideals and the concept of futurity itself; they convey the role art plays in the future’s many imaginings.
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With news feeds filled with images of despair, collapse, and violence, it may often feel as if the future is no longer conceivable. The very idea of a world in which humanity flourishes seems distant to daily narratives of cataclysm. And yet, these narratives are themselves stories about how humanity thinks about itself—an expression of the human imaginary.
Throughout history, and particularly in British Columbia, art has served as a liquid vessel through which dreams of the future find their own prismatic reflection. It is a form through which humanity both conceives of, and critiques, the narratives that shape our future.
This exhibition traces the spectrum of futurity, a mode of imagining the future in all of its tempting humours and horrors: from lush fantasies of aesthetic splendour and abundance, to the spectres of nuclear apocalypse; from idealistic self-help programs and artificial landscapes, to the dominance of computational thinking and technological solutions; and from the promise of a better life through the democratic nation-state and improved civic infrastructure to the hells of economic scarcity, ecological catastrophe, social breakdown. The worlds of utopia and dystopia coexist, each a dark reflection of the other’s excesses.
In popular culture, utopia and dystopia often manifest in the form of fantasy—worlds of vibrant beauty and abundance, or stagnation and decay. But at heart, these ideas beckon more deeply to the meaning of what it is to be a human embedded within a world of uncertainty. Artists rupture assumptions of the future, and in so doing, bring about the possibility of change.
Artists: Carel Moiseiwitsch, Tom Nickson, Katherine Knight, Colette French, Gary Lee-Nova, Doug Biden, Vikky Alexander, FASTWURMS, Laura Lamb, Micah Lexier, Barbara Todd, Margaret Naylor, jil p. weaving, Keith Langergraber, Alex McLeod, Jim Adams, Haris Sheikh, David Neel, Jer Thorp, Robert Youds, Don and Cora Li-Leger, Daniel Jolliffe, Anna Wong, Myfanwy McLeod, Marcus Bowcott, Carole Itter, Judy Chartrand, Sylvia Grace Borda, David Ostrem, Meera Margaret Singh, Linda Stanbridge, Miki Aurora, Heather Kai Smith, Tsēmā Igharas, and the PLOT community garden project.
Join us for our Summer Opening celebrating the launch of Future Memoria and ARTS 2024. There will be two events in connection to Future Memoria. Friends of the PLOT Community Gathering will take place Saturday, July 27 from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Future Memoria Exhibition Tour with Roxanne Panchasi will happen Saturday, August 10 from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Curator: Rhys Edwards
Origin of Exhibition: Surrey Art Gallery