Exhibition dates: February 3 – March 30, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 3 | 5:00PM – 7:00PM
You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow is a group exhibition that brings together Michael Chang & S. Kai Lin, Alison Chen, Alexsa Durrans, and Xirin, whose exhibited works pose an inquiry into different eras of time – past, present, future, imagined – and their impacts on one’s identity and memories. What can the concept of time do as a vehicle, tool, or weapon, and how does it shape-shift and recircuit our lived experiences? The diverse mediums of performance and dance, film and video, new media and installation, and written text relate to the various ways that the concept of time can be explored. The exhibited works are all in varying stages of ongoing or recent development, further emphasizing how time is never still and can be captured through numerous methods.
The exhibition features the premiere of Xirin’s performance art film, Disease Tour: Stage One (2024), in which the oral passing of a key between the artist and numerous performers considers queer longing and the multiple futures that longing embodies. Alison Chen’s text piece, In and Out (2005 – Present), is an ongoing documentation of her moments of being in and out of love within her current relationship. Represented by a list of times, dates, and years, this positions her work in the continuum of time-stamped, durational artworks of the 20th and 21st centuries. In the front of the gallery, Michael Chang & S. Kai Lin will present a new version of their current collaborative installation, From Here To There: A Time Machine (2019 – Present). This new media sculpture investigates how memories can – or cannot – be contained, and looks at the concept of time travel as aspirations of movement and expansion. Dancer and choreographer Alexsa Durrans presents a public dance workshop and new video artworks, including Console Portraits and Gesture, console, (both 2023), in which the artist experiments with the preoccupation of time and form and how this is relative to the human body.
The artists of You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow take a deep look at the significance of time and its relation to isolation, memory, sensuality, and intimacy. This wide-ranging group of works explores some of the ways that one can mark, capture, or consider the concept of time’s passing, which are ultimately relative and situational.
You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow is organized by FOCA Curators Lab recipient Adrianne Ramsey.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Michael Chang is a Taiwanese American conceptual artist and writer based in Southern California. His installations and readymades have recently been shown at the San Diego International Airport, LA Artcore, the Goodfight Studio, and the Irvine Fine Arts Center.
Alison Chen (she/her b. 1986, New York City) is a Los Angeles based visual artist. She received her M.F.A. from Parsons School of Design in 2013 and her B.F.A from Cornell University in 2008. She maintains a studio practice working in video, performance, photography, and text. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at spaces and festivals including the Torrance Art Museum, the CUE Art Foundation, the Dali International Photo Festival, and Beijing Design Week. Her professional practice has been recognized with residencies at the Wassaic Project and Kala Art Institute. She has also had the honor to study under the direction of Magnum photographer, Antoine D’Agata.
Alexsa Durrans works as a choreographer and video artist creating site-specific movement landscapes and sculptural video installations. Alexsa’s work with the body, hers and others, resists docility and imagines deviations in time and space. She shifts movement into digital, site-specific and non theatrical environments, using already built infrastructures to explore visual hierarchies coded into bodies and spaces. She employs techniques of gestural choreographies and activates everyday technologies such as the iPhone to articulate the nuances of the Post-Internet body. Alexsa’s work traces, perpetuates and disrupts embodiment with the aim to suggest new iterations of how socialized bodies interact.
S.Kai Lin is a Fuzhounese American artist and cultural organizer. Their interdisciplinary work has been shown at the Seattle Asian American Film Festival, Floating Projects Collective Hong Kong, and the Film and Video Poetry Society.
Xirin is a multidisciplinary artist whose work invents spaces of affection and sensual play. She creates performances, videos, and installations that together work to heal the collective wounds brought on by a shared lack of physical connectedness. The collaborations and duets in her work create a world in which marks of embrace can be seen and felt. The idea of gift-giving is also integral to the world, where relationships can be explored through generous exchanges. Xirin has exhibited her work at institutions such as the Jewish Museum, CUE Art Foundation, A.I.R. Gallery, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work has been featured in publications such as Pitchfork, Vestoj, and PAPER magazine. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA from Columbia University, and is currently completing her postdoctoral studies at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.
CURATOR BIO:
Adrianne Ramsey is an independent curator and arts editor. She has organized exhibitions and programming for Berkeley Art Center, Fellows of Contemporary Art (FOCA), Root Division, and USC Roski Galleries, and is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of GIRLS (2017 – Ongoing), a publishing company that produces collaborative printed materials and a digital magazine featuring multigenerational and femme-identifying contemporary artists, curators, and thinkers. Her writing on contemporary art and culture has appeared in several exhibition catalogues and publications, such as AWARE, BLATANT, and Cultbytes, and she has given talks at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and Perfect Exposure Gallery. Her recent achievements include being a 2024 FOCA Curatorial Lab Program Awardee; 2023 Alternative Exposure Grantee; the Inaugural Artist Power Center Artist of the Month (July 2022); and a 2020 YBCA 100 Honoree. She holds both a B.A. in Art History and an M.A. in Curatorial Practices from the University of Southern California.
