Near in the Distance
Near in the Distance: Annual Resident Artist Exhibition
Redline Contemporary Art Center
2350 Arapahoe Street, Denver, Colorado 80205
January 24-March 8, 2020
Curator: Nicole J. Caruth
Admission: Free
Review by Sara Sisun
Each year, Redline Contemporary Art Center selects a topic to address in its planned series of exhibitions. The 2020 theme is an exploration of the ambitious and experimental genre of Afrofuturism—a term coined in the 1990s to describe a movement of art, literature, music, and philosophy that began in the 1950s and 60s which explores the intersection of technology and the African Diaspora through mythology, fantasy, and mysticism.
Near in the Distance, the annual resident artist exhibition at Redline, is the first show in the Afrofuturism series. It includes eighteen current resident artists and recent alumni who respond to the theme authentically and responsibly. [1] Some artists use the prompt as an opportunity to explore the topic of possible futures more generally, while others choose to engage directly with issues of white privilege, gentrification, surveillance, and social justice.
The exhibit has almost no direct references to the icons or symbols of black space voyagers, African music, or other expressions of Afrofuturism. [2] It does, however, engage loosely with the subjects of technology, political transformation, and our destruction of the natural world.
In the foreground: Regan Rosburg, Everything is Fine, 2020, ghost nets, plastic flotsam, handwritten letters, 3D-printed bio-poems, shelves, and hardware. Image by DARIA.
Regan Rosburg uses “sea net” gathered from the arctic to construct an elegant wall hanging of blue rope and plastic material. The opposite side of this sculptural wall is collaged with letters written by children and adults about their feelings in response to climate change. On display in front of these letters are a series of “bio-sculptures”: three-dimensional prints designed from poetry translated by a machine into genetic code. Rosburg’s addition to the show isn’t a projection of a science fiction utopia, but a sad reflection on our present climate crisis. Negating the core idealism and fantasy of the Afrofuturist aesthetic, the piece instead engages with the themes of erasure and the threatened roots of humanity in the natural world.
In the foreground: Trey Duvall, Latent Variability in Axiomatic Structures, 2020, steel pipe, motors, and cables. On the back wall: Lares Feliciano’s installation Querer Ser. Image by DARIA.
Other works in the show engage with the idea of possible, speculative, and perhaps hopeful futures. Latent Variability in Axiomatic Structures by Trey Duvall uses giant steel pipes to reflect the potential of shifting conditions and unpredictable arrangements. Hung from cables and motorized, the poles rotate and dance, creating innumerable compositions of sounds and space.
Anthony Garcia Sr., White Washed, 2020, acrylic and latex. Image by DARIA.
Anthony Garcia’s two-sided mural represents the choice between acceptance and gentrification. On one side a colorful wall is painted over partially with clean white, on the other the dull designs of graffiti are barely visible under layers of white and gray. There are two futures on display: one where the past is covered, and the other where layers of visual culture remain exposed.
Tya Alisa Anthony, Real Estate Jenga, 2020, cardboard and chalkboard paint interactive installation. Image by DARIA.
Colby Deal, Bloodshed No More, 2019, wheat paste image of archived film scan. Image by DARIA.
Gentrification is a theme picked up again by Tya Alisa Anthony’s sculpture Real Estate Jenga and Colby Deal’s large scale portraits. These works engage with current pressures in housing and community. Anthony’s piece is an exploration of the history and ongoing impact of systemic segregation in real estate in America on people of color. This project was inspired by the “Vacants to Value” program in Baltimore City where over 16,000 row homes will either be demolished or sold to be refurbished. Deal uses wheat-paste—a material suggestive of activism, propaganda, alcohol, and nightclub posters—to display large-scale photographs of individuals within the African-American community. The portraits offer the viewer an opportunity to appreciate these young people and reflect on how a specific community is affected by gentrification and injustice.
Whether in terms of social justice or climate change, the insistence on confrontation with our present reality by the artists throughout the show perhaps departs from the approach of Afrofuturism, which seeks justice within imagined realities. The exhibition instead offers a viewpoint similar to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s long form letter to his son, Between the World and Me. [3] Rather than defeating expectations and odds in fictional realms, the insistence in Near in the Distance on present crises recalls Coates’ assertion: “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” Meaningful struggle is as worthy of reflection as fantasy, and both can aid the hopeful construction of a concrete utopia. [4]
Sara Sisun is an artist and professor in the departments of Illustration and Foundations at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. She holds a BA in Art Practice from Stanford University, an MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MA in Art History and Critical Theory from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
[1] The artists included in the exhibition are Tya Alisa Anthony, Chris Bagley, Sarah Bowling, Colby Deal, Trey Duvall, Lares Feliciano, Anthony Garcia Sr., Caleb Hahne, Juntae TeeJay Hwang, Marsha Mack, Tony Ortega, Charles “Chuck” Parson, Eileen Roscina Richardson, Regan Rosburg, Kenzie Sitterud, Kate Speer, Michael Sperandeo, and Carley Warren.
[2] Rue La Ferla, (Dec. 12, 2016), “Afrofuturism: The Next Generation,” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/fashion/afrofuturism-the-next-generation.html
[3] Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York, New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).
[4] For further, relevant reading on philosophies of utopia, see Ruth Levitas, "Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia," Utopian Studies 1, no. 2 (1990): 13-26.
