Time + Space: Futures 

Co-curated with Alex Priest.

Since 1981, the Bemis Center has provided artists with time and space to produce new work and take creative risks. In this yearlong two-part exhibition series, Time + Space examines and celebrates the organization’s thirty-five years of supporting artists from around the world. Beginnings, the exhibition’s first chapter, explored earth as medium and subject matter, and was inspired by Bemis’s origins as an artist-in-industry program for artists working in clay and ceramic sculpture. 

Futures, the second chapter, coincides with our second thematic residency, “Sci-Fi and the Human Condition,” and celebrates Bemis alumni who take vastly different approaches to concepts of time and space. The exhibition surveys the science-fiction or futurist impulse in the work of Bemis alumni, paying special attention to social criticism or protest—the dream of a new social order expressed in terms of magic, the fantastical, dystopian and utopian futures, post-apocalyptic worlds, artificial intelligence, futurist architecture, and the location of self within an imagined future. Newly commissioned projects and performances in this exhibition celebrate the breadth of Bemis’s legacy. Participating artists: Ting-Tong Chang, Micol Hebron, Aaron Jones, Gabriel Martinez, nova Milne, Kambui Olujimi, Robert Pruitt, Jessica Segall. Photos: Colin Conce

The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, June - September, 2016