MKG127 is pleased to present Weather Room, an exhibition of new work by Geoffrey Pugen
Opening Saturday, January 11, 2:00 – 5:00 PM
Please join Geoffrey Pugen and Julian Cox as they discuss the role of the hyper sublime in the exhibition at 4pm on Saturday, February 1st.
Weather Room imagines the uncertain future from our current existential moment. Geoffrey Pugen’s installation juxtaposes landscape photographs alongside video sculptures in the form of weather stations – engaging with our primordial fascination with forecasting the future.
In Pugen’s latest work, humans cease to exist and nature is left to flourish, forming an unexpected partnership with autonomous technology. The photos imagine sublime worlds in transition – at times serene, others haunted – while challenging the tendencies and tropes of mainstream science-fiction. Human presence is remembered by technology and manifests in the figurative weather towers, which continue to monitor the now hyper-flourishing ecological world, predicting the posthuman future for their own survival.
About the Artist
Weather Room represents Geoffrey Pugen’s latest experiment at the intersection of technology and nature through video, photo and installation. Pugen has developed a visual style grounded in docu-fiction aesthetics, while contemplating speculative futures, transhumanism, the impact of nature on society and conflicts between the virtual and the real.
Weather Room brings together elements of his docu-fiction practice that imagines futuristic worlds. For instance, the Utopics series (2004-07) marked the beginning of his manipulation of reality within films, photographs and installations that featured a corporation offering a metamorphosis program to modify the body into an animal. In Sahara Sahara (2009), a group of subversive women take on the oil and gas industry. In White Condo (2015) people compete to live in luxury towers in order to shield themselves from a dystopian environment. Four Winds (2017) entailed multichannel video sculptures, serving as zen-like sterile life coaches, speculating on the future of medicine and meditation.
Pugen’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Museum of Moving Image in New York, WRO Biennial in Poland, Bienal De La Imagen En Movimiento, Buenos Aires, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Germany, Rotterdam Film Festival. He is a recipient of the K.M Hunter Award for Interdisciplinary Art.
The exhibition continues until February 8th.
Review: MOMUS: The Apocalypse is Selective, Not Total: Geoffrey Pugen’s Disanthropic Moment by Tyler Muzzin