Future Perfect

A two-person exhibition with work by Lucia Love and Scoop Slone

I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught
as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter
of the imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin, introduction of The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Echoing visually what has been demonstrated in the world of literary fiction and more particularly in speculative fiction, the artists in Future Perfect represent narratives that hold forth a certain truth while freeing themselves from the constraints imposed by strict realism. They play with the idea of non-linear, shifting, or reconstituted timelines, bridging the gap between the visual vocabularies of science-fiction and myth on the one hand, and of anthropology and archeology on the other. They make work that is impossible to situate temporally or even spatially, while giving the viewer a glimpse of a moment or a narrative that can be believed in, regardless of if the depicted event or a personae is reconstituted from memory or projected through an act of imagination.

Out of mundane objects found in our everyday life and produced on a mass scale, Scoop Slone creates elaborate sculptural garments that take on the character of mysterious clothing displayed, without labels, in a natural science museum. The materials used are almost all binding tools: elastic bands, binding clips, plastic zip ties, metallic cables, which become tied to each other according to patterns and styles inspired by Slone’s Irish heritage and rock opera background, as well as club culture and folk traditions from around the world. A Butoh practitioner, Slone wears the resulting objects for hypnotic performances that carry ever-shifting symbolism and challenge fixed notions of identity, era, and geography. The viewer witnesses an unfolding that seems to resonate with an ancient past but that might be, in fact, a version of what the future will look like.

Lucia Love’s work exudes a slightly more apocalyptic mood, while also challenging the idea of linear narrative and escaping any attempt to time-stamp the resulting images. With great agility, Love shifts the representation modes inside the exhibited paintings: robotic Moirae-like characters coexist with lushly painted man-foetuses and women laying simultaneously above and under ground, their bodies slightly stretched as if some of their inner substance had been delicately removed, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Michelangelo’s flayed man in the Sistine Chapel. A catastrophe is looming, or maybe has already taken place, and the result might somehow be brighter future. Love is telling us about rituals, fear, and freedom in a way that defies temporal and spatial categorization used in traditional storytelling.