Disparate Futures
xCurated by the Young Astronaut Club
Artists: Justin Amrhein, Nick Almquist, Torreya Cummings, Seth Curcio, and Leah Wolff.
July 18 - August 24, 2012
Disparate Futures gathers work in the spirit of the Young Astronaut Club, a fledgling organization dedicated to being curious, looking up more often, and thinking about the future in fantastical rather than practical terms. The Young Astronaut Club believes individualistic and wildly different versions of the future can and should coexist. The artists included in Disparate Futures address the invisible, utilitarian objects, impossible shapes, and language systems, broadcasting their practices into the unknown.
In his Pulled Parts series, Justin Amrhein renders complicated segments of machinery on mylar with intricate precision. It is only upon closer inspection, reading titles such as “Gilzit Tibler,” that the viewer realizes these parts are not from an engineer’s manual, but have sprung completely from the artist’s imagination. Amrhein presents the colorful parts separate from their larger functions, challenging the viewer to imagine possible uses for “Recharging System Q7.”
In work created specifically for Disparate Futures, Nick Almquist invents signal flags for space travel. These 26 graphic patterns communicate such messages as “changing course: galactic south,” and “life support failing,” to be used between astronautical ships. He captures both the real-life dangers of space travel and the romantic ideals of space exploration.
Addressing a different (more Earthly) mode of communication, Torreya Cummings’s project, Love Songs for Radio Hell, proposes to fill a space of dead airwaves she refers to as “Radio Hell.” According to Cummings, the radio format provides a unique opportunity for discovery, “New things can be found without knowing to look for them: strange music, secret messages, a path out of the familiar into a world of different possibilities.” LSFRH gathers sound from artists, curators, and engineers to create a playlist for eventual guerrilla broadcast from Lone Mountain, Nevada. This bundled collection of sounds remains unrealized, poised to exist as a sliver of unexpected programming amidst miles of static.
Seth Curcio’s Seeing in the Dark is a set of manipulated sonar images picturing deep sea locations. Sparse lines and grids provide information inaccessible to the human eye, but also contain an ominous underlying question: what does the sonar seek and will it remain unfound? Curcio’s Virtual Landscapes work from an opposite direction: using the fictional to reference the factual. Collages sourced from first person video games resemble early California landscape photographs, likening imagery from 19th-century exploration to the unknown vistas of the 21st century.
The final collection in Disparate Futures is a series of impossible shapes. Leah Wolff’s sculptures and works on paper represent two-dimensional figures that are initially interpreted as three-dimensional shapes. They are, however, impossible. They cannot exist in real space. These confounding, dissonant, and ultimately beautiful images open up a series of thought experiments. Central to Wolff’s Impossible Shapes and the Young Astronaut Club’s goals is the question: how do we go about realizing the impossible?
Young Astronaut Club
In 1984, the White House founded the “Young Astronaut Council,” a non-profit organization promoting math, science and technology in elementary and high schools. Today, there is no trace of the Council. The Young Astronaut Club hopes to supersede this mysterious gap in our social fabric. The Young Astronaut Club is interested in more than just space travel. Inductees promise to uphold certain ideals in exchange for membership. These include, but are not limited to: being curious, looking up more often, and thinking about the future in fantastical rather than practical terms. The Young Astronaut Club was founded by San Francisco artist Sarah Hotchkiss.
sarahhotchkiss.com
