DOOMSCAPES AND THE DIGITAL BEYOND
DOOMSCAPES AND THE DIGITAL BEYOND
Curator: Curtis Anthony Bozif
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“Doomscapes and the Digital Beyond” presents work about our damaged planet and its imagined future. Artists of all backgrounds, age groups, generations, and stages of their career explore the challenges to image, object, and meaning making in the context of die-offs, biodiversity loss, dead zones, extinction and the wild proliferation and unmitigated advancements in computational technologies.
With most natural systems on this planet in steep decline, cutting edge technologies are rapidly opening up vast new realms of discovery and innovation that promise to fundamentally change the way we, as humans, relate to each other and the world.
How does art, a technology with origins that stretch back to the dawn of symbolic human thought, negotiate a landscape beset by polycrisis (climate disruption, ocean acidification, pollution, natural habitat destruction, etc.)? How do artists find meaning in a culture where visuality is increasingly defined by the pixilated glow of a pulsing screen. A thoroughly digitized, interfaced, networked, and algorithmic society in which machines learn, intelligence is artificial, minds are extended, reality is virtual, and the future imagined as posthuman.
As the author, Erik Davis, puts it in his revelatory and prescient book, Techgnosis, “We live on the brink in a time of accelerating noise and fury, of newly minted nightmares and invisible architectures of luminous code that just might help save the day. The sense of an ending ruptures the false complacency of the everyday, and allows us to glimpse our global turbulence, if only for a blink of an eye, under the implacable sign of the absolute.”
Exhibiting Artists: Andrew Ackerman, Brandon Barr, April Behnke, Megan Bickel, Dan Bina, Alison Campbell, William Cody, Debra Couch, Jeff Crisman, Jonathan Dankenbring, Jackson Daughety, Liz Ensz, Frank Geiser, Sara Gevurtz, Ahna Girshick, Devin Gora, David Hauptschein, Katsy Johnson, Ruth Lantz, Kevin Maginnis, Katie Neece, Mary Neubauer, Darren Oberto, Cole Pierce, Mac Pierce, Sheri Rush, Nate Sandercock, Stephanie Schlaifer, Kendrick Shackleford, Katherine Sidelsky, Lee Stanton, Russ Thompson, Katie Vota, Cheryl Wassenaar, Erik Wenzel, Jonathan Worcester, Chris Wubbena, Brian Zimmerman
About the Curator:
Curtis Anthony Bozif is a Chicago-based visual artist and art writer. He was born in 1982 in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned his BFA in Painting and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2006. That same year, he moved to Chicago where, in 2008, he earned his MFA from the Department of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University. His art has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in numerous private collections throughout the country. To date, his art criticism has been featured in Newcity and Bridge magazines.
Since 2008, Bozif has worked as a Digitization Specialist in the Repository & Digital Curation Workgroup at the Northwestern University Libraries where he specializes in cultural heritage imaging and digital assets and project management with an emphasis on color management, image quality standards, analytics, and quality control.
Aside from making his own art, Bozif enjoys thinking and writing about other peoples art; reading about nature, ecology, history and art; hiking, backpacking, and camping; and listening to jazz and classical music. He keeps his studio and lives with his wife, Zoë, and their growing family of houseplants, in the lakeside neighborhood of Rogers Park on Chicago’s far northside.
Opening Reception, Friday, April 5, 5:00-8:00pm
Exhibition dates: April 4 - 27, 2024
Gallery hours: Thurs – Fri 2-6pm, Sat – Sun 12-4 pm
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.