Terminus

Terminus is a mode of exhibiting photographs from A History of the Future along with objects curated from institutional collections that simultaneously extend both the allegorical potential of the images and their geographic specificity.  A History of the Future consists of large-scale photographs of landscapes where scientists are studying the impacts of climate change.  The images often have a placid surface and an ominous undercurrent.  They bear titles that refer to a specific place on the globe and a specific climate change impact represented, but on the other hand often come across as symbolic, strange, even like a landscape on another planet. A History of the Future is at once documentary, pertaining to this very real crisis happening right now, and allegorical, pertaining to a larger tale about the discrepancy between human time and geologic time, agency and determinism.   The curation of objects from indexical institutional collections and enigmatic display within a contemplative environment pulls further at the tensions inherent in the photography.  The photographs are instants of time.  The object research seeks an understanding (necessarily fragmentary) of the various histories that are culminating in this moment.