FUTURO PERFECTO
Futuro Perfecto March 10, 2011 - April 9, 2011
Curated By Anthony Allen And Katayoun Vaziri

Artists: Brooke Berger, Christi Birchfield, Tim Campbell, Ximena Diaz, Tracey Goodman, Sarah Hotchkiss, Nicholas Johnston, David Leggett, Mary Mattingly, Eliza Myrie, Jonathan Peck, Chris Samuels, Mike Schuwerk, Jessica Segall, SKOTE, Fabian G Tabibian, Jessica Wheelock, Brian Zegeer, Raphael Zollinger

...The future perfect is, in a sense, a grammatical combination of the future and the past. It is used to indicate an action that will have taken place before another action or point in the future; and it can also express probability or supposition about events or situations in the past. The exhibition Futuro Perfecto, which takes its title from one of the works on view, brings together the work of 19 artists and one collaborative, all alumni of the Skowhegan residency program for emerging visual artists. In the title work, a video log of abandoned construction sites, the camera advances forward while simultaneously zooming out, thus creating a shifting and unsettling expression of stasis. Likewise, many of the works on view share concerns related to the experience of historical and personal time today. Are we moving ahead or mired in quicksand? Is the present our escape from the unattainable past and the impending future? Can visual codes be recycled and repurposed? In the digital age, have "here" and "now" become avatars? The tectonics of today result from shifts between revolution and continuity, production and destruction, the global and the personal. The artists gathered here find new strategies to make these fault lines visible.

Anthony Allen, curator of Parsons MFA show 2009 is an independent curator, scholar and translator, and is also associate director of Paula Cooper Gallery.