Approaches to Portraiture
Artists: Curated by Bethany Fincher, Emily Broad, Bridgette Fleming- Artist include: Rian Ciela Hammond,H Boone, Eli Brown, Rio Sofia, and Abdi Osman
Dates: July 30, 2025 - September 12, 2025
Artist Statement
Trans Futurity draws inspiration from the inciting claim of the 2025 Science Fiction Research Association Conference: "Trans people are (in) the future."
Inspired by artist Alisha B. Wormsley's proclamation, "There are Black People in the Future," this statement's simple descriptive structure paradoxically underscores the force and radicality of such a claim. A statement of fact rather than a rallying cry, "Trans people are (in) the future" boldly indexes and makes a dual truth claim about an existent future: trans people are there in that future, and they are that future.
Accordingly, the works in this exhibition take "the future" not as a distant or determined destination, but as a matter of potential futurities that are actively molded in the present and uncovered in the past. The strategies that fulfill this claim include hacking and recoding the inherited tools of colonial technoscience, as seen with Rian Ciela Hammond's multimedia exploration of steroid hormone production; finding and cultivating affinities across species, as with Eli Brown's speculative survival kit and interactive database; and—as embodied by Rio Sofia's autobiographical work-playing and performing across the vulnerable but vitalizing spectrum of possibilities that is opened up by the prefix trans-.
Against ahistorical presumptions that gender variance is "new," these artists draw on archives to reenliven the trans futurities that have been erased. Abdi Osman's Plantation Futures, inspired by Katherine McKittrick's essay of the same name, explores how the logic of plantations continually shapes the present and uses parafictional photography to "plot" Blackness and gender outside of carceral norms. Trans ROC Speaks and H Boone create their own idiosyncratic archives, the former through an oral history of lived experiences and local activism, and the latter through scans of the artists' trans friends recombined and 3D-printed into posthuman sculptures. The works in Trans Futurity show how the essentializing categories of race, gender, sexuality, and nature are mutually constituted in the interest of consolidating power, profit, and the privatization of the earth. Together, they combat these processes of isolation to stake a claim for a future rooted in care and coalition—a future no less than trans*