Future Ecologies
Curated by Danny Orendorff
Vox Populi Gallery
September 25 – October 31, 2021
Major Support from the Edna W. Andrade Fund of The Philadelphia Foundation

Artists: Blanche Brown, Emily Carris-Duncan & Joanne Douglas, Dakota Gearhart, Rian Ciela Hammond, Matte Hewitt, Mandy Katz, Natalie Kuenzi, Melissa Langer & Roopa Vasudevan, Kay Seohyung Lee, Malachi Lily, Kirk McCarthy, Nicole Olivieri Pagán (ElociN), Salvador Muñoz, Makeba Rainey & Julien Terrell, Raúl Romero, Zac Skinner, Misty Sol, Lane Speidel, Aaron Terry, and Tiny Farm Wagon

About the Exhibition
Future Ecologies is an exhibition of contemporary art projects that seek to reorient individual and collective relationships to nature in its current state of emergency. Taking climate breakdown as a given condition of our time, the artworks on view propose visions for what may lie ahead, oscillating between the fantastical and the practical – where invention tends to thrive.

Featuring over 20 artists, including several members of the Vox Populi Collective, Future Ecologies is a sprawling exhibition including vibrant, hallucinatory, provocative, and political approaches to ecologically-themed art making today.

For many exhibiting artists, imagining life in the future entails drawing upon ancestral methods of survival and skill-sharing, as well as Pre-Columbian or non-Western paradigms of deifying, learning from, and interacting with nature. Others fantasize about the end of human-supremacy on Earth, imagining a coming landscape replete with rapid mutation and highly evolved hybrid lifeforms – hinting at a bio-diverse future (and past) that contains multitudes of genders, sexualities, and species.

Despite our bleak forecast at present, Future Ecologies is not de facto dystopian. It is, instead, curious about whatever world comes next, who inhabits it safely, and how.

Images c/o Raúl Romero