Future Forging: Mythos of the Cybernaut

@ The CU Experience Gallery

September 17 - November 5, 2022

Co-curated by Sharifa Moore and Cherish Marquez

Across the span of the last two years, we’ve experienced a collective trauma that has infiltrated our consciousness. As we attempt to heal, we have hastened to a return of what was, with little opportunity to process how we’ve changed. A benefit of isolation came through the enhancement of our ability to communicate utilizing technology, furthering our transformation into a boundaryless space, forever changing our relationship with our bodies and our identities. 

Future Forging: Mythos of the Cybernaut explores our connection with machines as an apparatus for communication, interaction, and as an extension of the body. Dependency does not connote technology addiction, but rather how machines assist us, how they allow collaboration across time and space, and how they serve as archives of our existence and experience. This exhibition explores themes of the posthuman body as one that rejects the binary, embraces glitch, connection, celebrates queerness, reimagines the disabled body as cyborg, and envisions new mythologies. Across a multitude of exquisite instabilities, of de-normativity, of becoming the hyperobject.

Cybernauts reject binaries within all spaces, both in reality and in the digital space. They traverse between mythologies, cyberspace, and multiple expressions of the self, abstracting the present and the ego. They are aligned through the rendering of pixels and the output of energy. Inserting themselves in the middle of ones and zeros; blurring the lines between the system, and themselves.

Featuring works by local and international artists including: Sophie Kahn, Nima Bahrehmand, Kevin Sweet & Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Red Pig Flower, Paloma Kop, Bryan Leister, Sam Grabowska, Maggie Mather, Mary Grace Bernard, Jameel Paulin, Michael Sperendeo, J. Benjamin Burney, and Maria Paula.

We will additionally host two performance evenings featuring: Maria Paula Morera, Mary Grace Bernard, and Casa De Houses (Alejandra Abad and Steve Jones) along with open community projection in the Arts Complex.