In a room that places the viewer beyond the contemporary anthropocene, Ivan Argote creates a temporary vignette of the future - one that transcends the pious mediations of men looking to uphold sculpted views of history. The pink cracked floor is reminiscent of Mars, setting the backdrop for a mausoleum of unnamed conquistadors past - now reduced to nothing but glorified plant pots. 

The room itself acts as a physical placeholder for monuments around the world when the cold winds of nuclear war eventually terraform the world into a wasteland.  In these conditions, in Argote’s tongue-in-cheek vision, he’s not interested in the victors of humanity, but rather the organic undercurrents of the oft overlooked actors of flora and fauna. 

Savannah College of Art and Design’s 15th annual deFINE ART series of exhibitions, talks, and tours celebrates the foremost in the contemporary art world. This year, the university celebrated honoree Cao Fei, as well as conceptual artist Awol Erizku. This year’s gallery features an impressive slate of artists including Holly Henry, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Ivan Argote, Sujay Shah and Cammie Staros (an incomprehensive list of all of the exhibited artists!) 

Thoughtfully brought together by chief curator Daniel S. Palmer, the 15th iteration of the show, is representative of the art world today. As wide as the scope of the artists within this exhibition are, they overlap and intersect with gracious help from SCAD’s contemporary art museum. This year’s programming brought together artists representative of the art landscape of today - one that is not only moving beyond the rules of the historically white walls of the gallery but beyond human narrative as a whole. As a result, the individual exhibition halls throughout the museum have been modified to best accommodate their latest host in true southern hospitality. 

As you enter the exhibition space, the first wing belonging to Awol Erizku is first marked by a gigantic green neon sign created from Malik el-Shabazz’s X iconography. The rest of the room is organized in similarly bold colors, with the walls of the space painted in red, black, and green, the colors of the Pan-African flag.

In the adjoining room, Cammie Staros has constructed walls in Daedalean fashion, creating a labyrinth to house her artifacts. At points, the walls are exposed and raw, creating the museum space in her own image of the far-future-living-past from the pedestals that house her clay vessels to the living fish occupying Sunken City.

The rest of the show is just as impressive, with shadowy dioramas and thoughtfully inputted m crown molding working to disrupt the fast moving feng shui of Cindy Ji Hye Kim’s gallery hall and full size mixed reality environments from Cao Fei’s films and past, inclusive of the theater entrance where the artist resided in Guanzhou, China.

Hosted at SCAD’s Savannah campus, the university has completed a series of revitalization areas within the city. Transforming the old shipping and railway downtown into a historically conscious destination that celebrates the area’s past, SCAD has created an environment for students to thrive and pursue the arts. The university has continually renewed its commitment to the public arts, something that shows on the external facade of the SCAD MOA within the external jewelboxes that house Holly Hendry’s critical Watermarks exhibition. This piece, which considers the history of the museum building as a transit hub and as an interconnected part of the community through winding passages and conduits, depicts the theme of flowing water in the surrounding aquatic landscape and internally through our human anatomy.