Opening September 9 this year at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn is an exhibition that will display time capsules from the former San Francisco-based design studio Ant Farm and its contemporary successor LST. Titled The Present Is the Form of All Life: The Time Capsules of Ant Farm and LST, the exhibition will present an interactive media sculpture as well as a chronology of Ant Farm’s time capsule works spanning from 1969-75.
LST, comprising Ant Farm’s core members Curtis Schreier and Chip Lord as well as Bruce Tomb, have created a large inflatable structure for the exhibition. The structure, according to a press release, “explores the mutable nature of time perception, media obsolescence, and our shifting cultural attitudes toward preservation, consumer objects and privacy.” Typical of the Ant Farm vernacular, the structure and the exhibition touches on utopian dreams and counterculture movements.
Inside the inflatable will be a re-invisioning of Ant Farm’s famed Media Van. While set to be nostalgic, the exhibition will present Ant Farm’s work from the perspective of their shortcomings. In addition to this, much of the group’s never seen before archival works are also set to be displayed. An undated video of Tomb, Schreier, Lord and Paul Rauschelbach inside the van and discussing its functions can be seen here.The exhibition will be also feature a series of lectures from the artists, classes taught through Pioneer Works’ education department, as well as a book: The Present is the Form of All Life: The Time Capsules of Ant Farm and LST.
“Over the course of five decades, and specifically through their time capsule works, Ant Farm and LST have routinely transcended disciplinary boundaries and, through experimentation, pioneered new artistic mediums that challenge viewers to think differently” said exhibition co-curator and Pioneer Works Director Gabriel Florenz in a press release. “Transcending boundaries and encouraging experimentation are at the heart of Pioneer Works’ mission. Through this exhibition, we celebrate and hope to learn from those who established the practices and approaches that our organization strives to foster through a diverse range of programs.”
The Present Is the Form of All Life: The Time Capsules of Ant Farm and LST will run through October 21 of this year and was co-curated by Liz Flyntz. See here for more details.