The future perfect will have arrived, curated by Bridget Mullen: Lucas Blalock, Lindsay Burke, Sophia Flood, Autumn Knight, Dana Lok, Kenny Rivero

In what world might we hang a portrait not of a loved one but of Earth’s closest asteroid? Bennu, a painting by Sophia Flood, captures our nearest asteroid’s likeness on canvas scrap nestled in plaster nestled in wood. The asteroid Bennu is an amalgamation of planetary material that may or may not hit Earth next century. It is essentially core-less, without its own center, a structure made up only of other structures. With Flood, as with the other artists presented here, there’s a sense that ideas don’t come onto the scene fully formed but are being chased during creation. They’ve each invented their own idea-generating structure that prods an experience wherein even the self is mutable and will be changed.

In Burke’s paintings, and in many of the works in the show, a structure had to be invented to carry out the work of the subject. For Autumn Knight that structure is time-based. Known for staging absurdist and experimental performances using didactic lesson, talk show, or drama therapy as delivery system, Knight mingles playful, uncertain situations with exploratory movement and cultural references via language. Moments of engagement don’t get carried to typical ends; actions are clipped, flipped, abandoned, or repeated. Nothing is put into a movement that isn’t felt in that moment. Nothing should happen. Nothing is pushed towards a tidy or specific end. Structure to Knight could be riffing off the objects left behind in a space; doing a live zoom performance, giving out her number, and taking calls; toggling between multiple camera points-of-view; or interacting with the audience to engage the race, gender, and power dynamics present. Knight sees that things have always been collapsing around us, but she makes the future feel like a thrill we can alternately rage into and take cozy little naps through.

There’s power in turning things over or inside out, to reconstituting the world through your specific lens, to diffusing power where there shouldn’t be, and embedding power where it should. Kenny Rivero’s paintings have this charge; they work like talismans that carry the visible and invisible aspects of his experience. Rivero creates a lexicon wherein beliefs are suspended in map-like street scenes, iconic superheroes, symbolic letters, and statistics. It feels important that his paintings resist hyper-realness, that what has empowered these works remains fuzzy, half-there, seemingly in a dream state. There’s magic in allowing the feelings that got you there—love, grief, fear, hope, and longing—to propose and instigate a way forward with wit and grace.