THE ALIEN-NATIONS AND SOVEREIGN STATES OF OCTAVIA E BUTLER
FROM ARTIST chlee - A FEELING BOTH FAMILIAR YET BRAND NEW
by P. Andrews-Keenan
I’ve had the privilege of experiencing Candace (chlee) Hunter’s work in many settings – The South Side Community Art Center, the DuSable Black History Museum, Stella Jones Gallery in NOLA and Blackbird Gallery in Detroit. Yet while there is a familiarity to her work, it comes across as totally new and different each time. Such is the case with her exhibit in the Kanter Family Foundation Gallery at the Hyde Park Art Center. The exhibit opened yesterday and continues until March 3, 2024.
Here the artist once again masters multiple medium – installations, collage, paintings, audio. The things that are consistent and familiar are the use of magazines, vintage maps, cloth, various re-used materials. This newest landscape also includes foliage and of all things a unicorn.
Specifically, The Alien-Nations and Sovereign States of Octavia E Butler takes us to an apocalyptic moment in time, that eerily enough in true Octavia Butler fashion – mirrors todays. The exhibition notes say it best.
“In 1993, Butler envisioned the impending world at odds and headed for destruction. Violence in community streets, food scarcity, environmental devastation.”
The novels the artist pulls from, Parable of the Sower and Lilith’s Brood: A Tribology, chronicle the end of society as we know it. And can’t we all just see it? Between the years 2025 – 2027 (eerie again).
