MALADO * FRANCINE

March 27 – May 5, 2023

Themes include ideas around archaeology and future artifacts, animism, hybrid beings, and the artistic creation of a more empathetic artificial intelligence. A human/animal/tech collaboration. Mythic creatures that blur the lines between the archeological past and the imagined technological future. An attempt to generate a feeling of deep time. The ancient reconfigured as newly totemic. The digital age as future artifact. Future tech as animist.

NADA Curated

After the End
Curated by Catherine Taft

Exhibition, Participants, About

“It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.” 

_{–Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986}

Endings are always beginnings. As an ending begins, it nudges our sense of “now” toward some hazy, perpetual future. It’s a future with soft edges. The future rarely arrives abruptly. It’s a slow burn. We are carried into it fluidly while the shades and shapes of reality are altered around us.

This exhibition was an invitation for artists to speculate about the future and the potential worlds that are imagined through present-tense-endings. Artists were asked to think beyond any notion of the apocalyptic and instead reflect on how life will adapt to experiences of a new now, be that political, industrial, ecological, terrestrial, and so on. The response was overwhelmingly vast and varied. That so many artists are toying with these ideas should make us take notice. They are among our most important world-builders…

– Catherine Taft, Deputy Director & Curator at LAXART