Press Release  May 5, 2021

Regen Projects Presents Group Show Make-Shift-Future

Photo: Evan Bedford, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

Installation view of Make-Shift-Future, curated by Elliott Hundley at Regen Projects, Los Angeles March 27 – May 22, 2021.

Regen Projects presents Make-Shift-Future, a group exhibition curated by Elliott Hundley, featuring Kevin Beasley, Elaine Cameron-Weir, rafa esparza, Max Hooper Schneider, Eric N. Mack, Alicia Piller, Eric-Paul Riege, and Kandis Williams.

Elliott Hundley on Make-Shift-Future:

"I am interested in studying ancient literature because, like speculative fiction, it can massage loose the underpinnings of our attachments to pervasive contemporary mythologies, so that we might gain a clearer view of ourselves and reveal the blind spots. So many blind spots.

Collage and assemblage function similarly by transposing tactile and familiar signs and symbols into new disquieting and uncanny situations. The medium, for much of its history, has scavenged for the discarded, broken, and disused. In this age of abundant material commerce, the predicted age of peak oil, we no longer need to wait to root through the trash. Objects are produced at such a staggering rate, that the time they spend in our lives is forever fleeting on the way to the landfill (tomorrow’s mine). These artists gather objects, valued and valueless, new and used, from their own material worlds. With the stuff of an ever-speeding present at hand, this current moment increasingly feels like the past.

Photo- Evan Bedford, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

Installation view of Make-Shift-Future, curated by Elliott Hundley at Regen Projects, Los Angeles March 27 – May 22, 2021.

This exhibition brings together the work of eight emergent American artists who exploit this excess materiality of global commerce to mine history, to attune us to the meaning and artifacts of other people’s lives, and, I believe, to point to potential futures. Though informed and formed by history, they reject any nostalgia. Like Edith and Sodom or Orpheus and Eurydice, there is no looking back!

As assemblage art is assimilated into the canon (see contemporary mythology) it hybridizes and folds back on the more traditional plastic arts. The work in this exhibition includes the full spectrum of the found and the fabricated, and in most cases, those distinctions are softened again through artistry. The labor of the artist seems always relevant, intermingled with the labor that produced these original objects in the first place. Did they make this stitch or that one? The intensity of the artist’s hand and this doubling of the making of these objects lend them their charge.

As with an artwork in the studio, unexpected meanings and connections reveal themselves in exhibitions. Seeing these works together, what emerged was a particular concern for the body and protecting it in different stages of life. The incubator, the skin, clothing, shoes, blankets, armor: What will we put on to keep us safe? What will we carry to keep us safe? What will help us in the future? What will liberate us?"

Regen Projects is open by appointment only. Make a reservation to visit the exhibition here.

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