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Future Tense peers into the future with a diverse combination of sculpture installations, constructions and photographically based mixed media works by Taro Hattori, Kathryn Kenworth, Srdjan Loncar and Daniel Ross. Their vision of our collective future is a world where landscapes will be made from information and nature has curiously been replaced with a dazzling digital substitute. Our interior environments will have morphed into hyper baroque décors decadently surfaced with mirrors and white faux fur. Join us at the Kala Gallery for a fast forward look at the future.

Taro Hattori presents Beaut Brute, a beautifully crafted and visually extravagant gallery installation. This shimmering futuristic interior meshes a rather unlikely combination of symbolic objects. Assault rifles covered in mirrors paired with luscious bunches of reflective grapes and white faux fur furniture, comprise this over-the-top environment. Hattori’s exploration into the culture of aestheticized violence, abundance and decadence, voice concerns about the future of our consumer obsessed world.

Kathryn Kenworth creates models, miniatures and oversized environments from simple everyday materials. Her jarring sense of proportion often produces an odd physical sensation of disorientation and unease. For Future Tense, Kenworth creates a virtual landscape of oversized hand-made cardboard books that undulate like a topographical map. However, this staggering abundance of books is actually a simple imitation. More like cardboard boxes, these ridiculously large piles of books can’t be opened and they can’t be read. Suggestive of the information overload that seems to be engulfing our world, impenetrable blocks of information are becoming the landscape of our future.

New Orleans-based artist Srdjan Loncar recently received a Kala residency award provided by the Alliance of Artists Communities and the Irvine Foundation for artists affected by Hurricane Katrina. Working in a witty yet sophisticated combination of sculpture and photography, Loncar creates installations of full-size Styrofoam models covered with fractured looking photographs of the image that the sculpture is made to represent. While in residency at Kala’s print studio, Loncar created a rustic campfire scene for Future Tense. Models of logs and tree stumps meticulously covered with detailed photographs of bark, predict a future where nature will be replaced by its photographic replica.

Daniel Ross also casts a concerned gaze towards the future of our environment with his seductively glossy photographic and sculptural combinations. Seamlessly blending decorative elements with concerns about the natural world, Ross masterfully reconstructs a fantastical digital universe of the future that is part dream and part nightmare. Intersecting the synthetic with the natural, the mundane with the sublime, the work references a range of topics from the cliché of nature painting to high tech bioengineering. As a recent Artist-in-Residence, Ross produced his series of large-scale digital prints in Kala’s Electronic Media Center.

Please join us for a Gallery Talk with the Artists on Saturday, July 15 at 2:00 pm. This event is free and open to the public.

Kala Art Institute location and hours:
1060 Heinz Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94710 (510) 549-2977

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday - Friday, Noon - 5:30pm; Saturday, Noon - 4:30pm

Classes offered days, evenings and weekends, free course catalogs available.

Exhibitions are free and open to the public.