Inspired by the urgency of the handwritten affirmation ‘So be it. See to it’ in one of Octavia Butler’s journals, Chicago-based artist Candace Hunter responds with a series of intimate collages set in dialogue with Butler’s fiction. Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction of the 1970s through early 2000s feels eerily prescient in a contemporary moment wrought by political upheaval, resurgent racism, and the ongoing devastation of climate change.
Hunter’s visual storytelling likewise offers portals into other worlds. Using collage as an aesthetic strategy for speculative fictions, she offers an embodied disruption of the “rational cosmology” of traditional pictorial and political order: contradictions of perspective and scale, time and space; reimaginings of race and gender, past and present. Through layers of destruction and creation, Hunter unfixes our sense of reality as neutral, given, or immutable. Both Hunter and Butler shape alternate realities, prompting us to contemplate our own.
Recipient of a local Mass Cultural Council Grant
Publication: Catalogue with text by Amy Halliday
Programs:
Artist’s Talk: The Chaos of Collage and Color in the Age of Romare Bearden and Octavia Butler, January 31, 2019
Phototransfer and collage workshops, February 1 and 2, 2019
Octavia Butler bookclub, February 24, 2019
Press and Public Relations
So be it. See to it. Invites viewers to imagine possible futures. The Shoestring, March 1, 2019
Collage exhibition presents speculative fictions of the future — and an invitation to create your own, Hampshire College website, January 28, 2019
Artist Candace Hunter talks about her exhibition on “Black in the Valley” podcast, WHMP radio, 36:20 mark, February 4, 2019