Yesterday's Tomorrows
From Catharine Clark Gallery Press Release
Yesterday’s Tomorrows is Andy Diaz Hope’s sixth exhibition with the gallery. Diaz Hope framed his previous collaborative exhibition with Laurel Roth Hope, An Inexhaustive Study of Power, as an exploration of how hierarchies are built into systems, how power changes over time, and who benefits from it. In his latest body of work, Diaz Hope continues this investigation through the lens of speculative futures.
He writes, "Science fiction as a genre came into mainstream popularity in the 1940s and 1960s, eras when the world was rocked by the advent and repercussions of atomic bombs, world wars, civil disobedience and political protest, and the beginnings of space exploration. Technology was growing exponentially, and new futures needed to be imagined. People were looking for answers to existential questions about morality that, for many, religion no longer answered. Writers tackled predictions of where technology might lead us. Those once-imagined frontiers are currently being explored in the areas of artificial intelligence, climate devastation, resource depletion, and private investment in space exploration.”
Diaz Hope describes this latest body of work as both highly conceptual and deeply personal. He reflects, "I was raised in a household of scientists and steeped in the methodologies of science and science fiction. My childhood home was filled with renowned physicists and the science fiction that they read by authors such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein, as well as the stories in Analog magazine. Later, I began to read literature with more diverse perspectives by authors like Octavia Butler, Nisi Shawl, Nnedi Okorafor, Becky Chambers, and Cixin Liu. My grandfather, with whom I lived and who stood in as my de facto father, immigrated to America with his children to work at the forefront of radar research and as a member of the Houston Space Center Ground Control design team. Influenced by my grandfather, I went to Stanford intending to get a PhD in Applied Physics but became more interested in art and design. I was raised with the belief that science and reason could solve all of humankind’s problems if implemented through democratic means.”
The works in Yesterday’s Tomorrows use the visual language of historic speculative fiction to imagine a simultaneously utopian or dystopian future that depends on our collective responsibility for humankind’s actions. Diaz Hope combines traditional craft techniques (stained glass, silkscreen, and collage) with new technologies (3D printing, deep space imaging, and A.I. image generation) to evoke this tension between nostalgia for an analogue past amidst an increasingly unstable and uncertain technological present.