NADA Curated by Catherine Taft

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

ExhibitionParticipantsAbout

“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

MAIDEN LA Biennial

Film premiere of “Creation Scenes”

From the artist’s “Lost Tapes” series comes “Creation Scenes,” based on footage misplaced for almost twenty years and recently re-discovered.

Using traditional film techniques like scratching the emulsion with a needle, splicing and taping the film, in combination with newer technology in editing including Ipad drawing and animated Gifs- to create a soft-spoken and evocative short film.

As a young filmmaker in the nineties, the artist would encourage intense performative acts by her friends and lovers in front of VHS and Super 8mm film cameras. Dawn, an ex-girlfriend, and Jesse, the artist’s ex-husband, as an artist in his own right, are subjects in this film.

“Creation Scenes” examines the idea of who is creator and who is the creation: woman birthing man; artist as the hand of ‘God’ -the filmmaker… A meta-narrative of a disembodied artist drawing on himself – as the filmmaker draws on top of him: ”X-ing out her exes’s…”


The film premieres at the Maiden LA Biennial September 1-20 2020.

You can view this film and others by the artist on VIMEO or via the FILM tab above on this website.