PROGRAM

Opening Reception for Xin Liu: Seedlings and Offsprings & Jenson Leonard: Workflow

Friday, July 7, 7–9 pm

This July, please join us in a public opening celebration of Xin Liu: Seedlings and Offsprings and Jenson Leonard: Workflow, two exhibitions which feature alumni of our artist residency program.

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DAILY ADMISSIONS

Visit Pioneer Works

Open Wednesday–Sunday, 12–6 pm

Can't make the opening reception? Visit Pioneer Works to view current exhibitions, shop the PW Store, and enjoy our sprawling garden.

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EXHIBITION

Xin Liu: Seedlings and Offsprings

July 7–September 10

Seedlings and Offsprings brings together a selection of artist Xin Liu's recent and ongoing projects that expand upon the artist’s explorations into themes including space travel, vitality, mutation, and immortality.

For the exhibition, Xin has created a new series of mixed-media sculptures inspired by biological and medical innovations such as cryonics and egg freezing. Another component of the exhibition is Living Distance, a three-part project that centers on the fantastical journey of Xin's wisdom tooth, which traveled aboard the International Space Station before returning to Earth.

Together with collaborator Lucia Monge, the artist also sent potato seeds into Earth’s lower orbit in March 2020, as part of the series Unearthing Futures, which responds to the rise of homogeneity in both agriculture and politics by casting potatoes as subjects that call for a diversified imagination of what the future can look like.

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EXHIBITION

Jenson Leonard: Workflow

July 7–September 10

The first institutional solo exhibition of artist Jenson Leonard, Workflow centers on a titular film that explores the velocity and momentum of Blackness as it relates to the philosophical concept of acceleration—the notion that the only way out of capitalism is through its intensification. 

In Workflow, a spectral Michael Jackson Halloween mask recites a surrealistic quarterly earnings reports. Building on a 2017 essay by artist Aria Dean titled “Notes on Blacceleration,” the short film centers on the ways in which the Black subject grapples with its commodified status within the labor market. Completed during Leonard’s residency at Pioneer Works in 2021, the video utilizes uncanny humor as a mechanism to expose the shared grammars inherent in Afro-pessimism and speculative finance.

Leonard will also lead a special tour of this exhibition, as part of our Second Sundays programming on July 9th

CLASS

Jenson Leonard:
Silicone Poetics

July 8, 1–3 PM

In this workshop, Leonard will walk participants through the poem at the center of his exhibition, Workflow, and the craft of mapping poetry to visual media in the context of AI language models and “PR speak”.

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