American Artist
Pioneer Works | 159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn
On view through April 13, 2025
In the new video and sculpture installation “Shaper of God” by American Artist, which is staged on a low platform in the cavernous space of Pioneer Works, the past, the present, and the fictional are layered for an effect of both simultaneity and continuity. Geography is one point of connection between Artist and science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, who both grew up in the nearby California communities of Altadena and Pasadena, respectively, a half-century apart. The show’s title is taken from the religious text written by Lauren Oya Olamina, the protagonist of Butler’s novel Parable of a Sower, 1993, whose post-apocalyptic setting seems especially prescient in light of last month’s devastating fires. (Artist’s exploration likewise feels especially well-timed, though it is the culmination of years of work.)
After leaving the fortified city of Robledo, Olamina creates a new community named Acorn. Here, To Acorn (1984), 2022, is a sculpture depicting an old bus sign similar to one that Butler would have stood under in her youth—an instance of Artist blending Butler’s biography with fictional elements from Sower. A trio of videos, playing on a large screen on the gallery’s back wall, showcases people, places, and events from the book. The first is a ’90s-style documentary about the Arroyo Seco parkland in Los Angeles. The second is a politically scattered presidential campaign video for Christopher Donner, the leading candidate in the novel. And the third is a fictional news segment about an astronaut who dies in the story, an event that serves as an entry point for a discussion of the meaning of space exploration. The surreality of combining the fictional with the real is very affecting and in one case—when the language in the Donner video is taken from the rapper Ye’s failed presidential campaign—it exposes the absurdity of our reality.
