Keystone Art Space Gallery
Illusions and Possibilities | Maps, Materials and The Lens
Opening Reception Saturday, Sept 7th 5-9pm
Exhibition Dates | Sept 7th to Sept 22th, 2024
Participating Artists
Alicia Piller, Los Angeles
Beth Davila Waldman, San Francisco
Naomi White, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA, Sept 7th, 2024. Keystone Arts Space Gallery presents “Illusions and Possibilities | Maps, Materials and The Lens”, a three artist exhibit featuring Alicia Miller, Beth Davila Waldman and Naomi White. The artist reception is Saturday, September 7th from 5-9PM at Keystone Art Space Gallery. There will be a closing reception Saturday, September 22th 6-9PM with an artist talk starting at 5PM. Gallery hours are Tuesday- Saturday 12pm-5pm and by appointment.
Curatorial Statement
“Landscapes according to W.J.T. Mitchell, are not a noun but a verb, employed as a technique of colonial representation. They are not a genre of photography or painting, they are a medium of imperialism.”
Responding to the precarity of our current political and ecological crisis, Landscapes of Illusions and Possibilities attempts to map and imagine buried and future realities. Exploring the way landscape is sold to us within the aesthetics of photography as truth, these three multimedia artists explore the influence of colonization on our current global mindset. Interweaving found, discarded and formed material with images, archival photographs, and disruptive interventions, Landscapes of Illusions and Possibilities aims to use ideas of transformation to connect resiliency, community and hope.
Pulling from various written sources such as Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, essays from the Terraforming Exhibition Catalog by Corey Kelly and W.J.T. Mitchell, and Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI: Power Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, the presented work will confront climate disaster, social issues of injustice and the physical shift on the planet considering the Anthropocene as a way to share the burden of such pain but also as a way to highlight the natural cycles of change and how it offers hope. When Octavia Butler wrote Parable of the Sower in 1993, she placed it in our present, beginning July 20th, 2024. As circumstances have presented in, in our present day reality, the very next day July 21st, 2024, our country experienced the most powerful opportunity for change with the stepping down of President Joe Biden bringing hope with our current new democratic candidate Kamala Harris. Rebuilding the narrative, pulling from what we source and reconstructed a new basis from which we can grow from it as the basis of all three artist’s practices. Their approach echoes and acknowledgment of what we are contending with the the power of transformation.