American Artist: Shaper of God at REDCAT
American Artist: Shaper of God at REDCAT Featuring newly commissioned work in video, installation, sculpture, and drawing, Shaper of God takes inspiration from science fiction author Octavia E. Butler’s novels and life, and the lives of other African-diasporic people who formed, and were formed by, the adjoining communities of Altadena and Pasadena, California. This exhibition by American Artist draws its title from an epitaph in the religious text “The Books of the Living”—written by Lauren Oya Olamina, the protagonist of Butler’s 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower —instructing followers to “Shape God.” Works alluding to the time and place in which Butler wrote are situated within a portrayal of Robledo, a fortified city in which Olamina spends the first part of the novel. After Robledo is sacked, she and other survivors trek across a dystopian California in the year 2024; they ultimately find refuge in Acorn, a new community founded by the lead character. The exhibition layers the landscapes in which Butler lived with those she imagined, in order to consider history’s cycles, and how these patterns can unpack the present as well as grow visions of a new future. Like Butler, American Artist spent their formative years in and around the adjacent communities of Altadena and Pasadena, in 2013 they legally changed their name to embody a term commonly used to denote artists as representatives of the United States. Like Olamina, who can be read as a response to the dearth of Black characters in sci-fi, and as a complex proxy for Butler herself, American Artist’s appropriation of this title as their name establishes them within a context from which African-diasporic artists have often been excluded, while at the same time it also reroutes and blurs such characterizations. Their work spans multiple forms of media and narrative to provoke a rethinking of how history and information is used, by whom, and to what end. By coupling seemingly heterogenous ideas around technology, race, surveillance, identity, and place, American Artist coaxes new perspectives on how power and agency are articulated by and through each. American Artist: Shaper of God is produced and organized by REDCAT and is curated by Adam Kleinman, Lead Curator for North America at KADIST, with Emily Gonzalez-Jarrett. Special thanks to Eleana Antonaki, Lily Braden, Robyn Braden, Joel Ferree, Gail Irby, Ayana Jamieson, Steve Matousek, Chester Toye, and the Octavia E. Butler archive at the Huntington Library. American Artist carried out part of their research for this exhibition while a grantee at the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, in communication with Ayana Jamieson, co-founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network as well as at the Octavia E. Butler archive at The Huntington, and through KADIST’s Ways of Reading initiative, which commissioned a related online project also called Shaper of God . Ways of Reading is a three-year KADIST initiative comprising seminars, exhibitions, and commissions taking place across North America, curated by Adam Kleinman. The program is part of a series of international projects that seeks to deepen KADIST’s investment in international collaboration by working with a curator, who works to establish key issues of social relevance in the region to guide production and research, located in various regions for a three-year term.