Theatre of Prodigies @ Ohio State University Lima

From February 27 to April 13, 2023, Ohio State University Lima hosted my solo exhibition Theatre of Prodigies in the Farmer Family Gallery. A “prodigy”, in Ancient Rome, was an extreme natural phenomenon. Prodigies were documented for divinatory purposes. Today, we like to think of ourselves as beyond superstitious practices like these, but we still attempt to draw out meaning from apparent patterns, unusual events, and more. Often, our predictive impulse is intimately linked to apocalyptic fantasies.

The term “apocalypse” isn’t an all-purpose synonym for “end of the world”. Rather, it refers to an explicitly biblical narrative and brings with it all of its related connotations. Its use is pervasive in everyday life, and its symbology is just as potent in the Judeo-Christian imagination. The artworks in Theatre of Prodigies think about End-Times from a more general perspective and employ the term “End-Times” to distinguish speculative futures and from these more canonical narratives. Is it possible that by projecting familiar narratives of the end into the present that we are, in fact, bringing forth such endings to the extent that they can be realized? What might an ending look like separated from such narratives? And can an ending be ongoing over time rather than the conclusion of a cataclysmic yet fairly rapid string of events? What ultimately determines an end? The closer we examine this idea, triangulating it with various perspectives on end-times, the more elusive it becomes.

While I had used text-to-image A.I. in a few of the pieces from 2022’s Dawning, almost every piece in Theatre of Prodigies contains some A.I. generated element. Whereas I was originally drawn to A.I.’s uncanny eccentricities and failures, in Prodigies, I was more interested in the End-Times narratives being projected onto these not-so-new but now more visible technologies. Whether or not these scenarios have any truth to them, I found the doomsday discourse interesting since it was like being able to witness the creation of a mythology in real-time. It struck me that while A.I. could indeed be used for evil, we are still at an early enough stage that A.I.’s story was still very much in flux. And what better way to direct this narrative than through art making? This is one of art’s unique powers: that ultimately, in all its forms, art defines the story. Isn’t this the whole premise - and hope - behind any type of representation in art?

The artworks in Theatre of Prodigies combine sculptural objects, architectural-scale installation components and 2D imagery. Part of the idea was to spatialize the otherwise screen-based, 2D A.I. images incorporated into these artworks. But, to relate it back to the End-Times narratives around A.I., these specific images were selected not only for their compelling scenery, but because they are open-ended. They seem to suggest something ominous, perhaps even catastrophic, but, under questioning, would reveal nothing specifically disastrous. The underlying message here is that the story these artworks, in the end, is the one that we put there.