Saya Woolfalk's latest exhibition, Visionary Reality Outpost, is on display at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Her works are a combination of science fiction, anthropology, technology, and art that create a world that is simultaneously set in the future and the past. Her work considers hybrid identities, especially in relation to the contemporary transcultural influences occurring in a technologically-centered, globalized world.
Since 2006, Woolfalk has been working on a narrative about a fantastical population of beings called the "No Placeans" who are part-human and part-plant and can change gender and color. In her storyline, a group of women in upstate New York stumbled on No Placean bones covered in fungi. As the women were exposed to the bones, a genetic alteration fused their human DNA with that of plants. The women renamed themselves "the Empathics" and set out to make this transformation possible for anyone. They founded the "Institute of Empathy" to excavate the bone site and formed a corporation called "ChimaTEK" to sell the transformational process to consumers.
With Visionary Reality Outpost, Woolfalk reimagines the gallery as a ChimaTEK day spa. The spa fosters mindfulness and self-actualization for its visitors. Harnessing its "ChimaCloud"—a digital universe populated by fragments, ideas, and forms uploaded by people from many cultures—Visionary Reality Outpost allows users to enact their desires for a positive possible future. The installation features work made by Woolfalk during her Artist and Industry residency at the Kohler Company factory in 2018.
“For Visionary Reality Outpost, I wanted to give people access to the ChimaCloud, to have people interact with it and to think about their own dreams and desires,” Woolfalk said. “I wanted to create an immersive environment where people could contemplate their ideas about utopia, ethics and the digital world, while also interacting with the installation. I want them to think about the impact of digital content on our offline world.”
Visitors are invited to associate themselves with one of four virtues; Justice, Courage, Prudence or Temperance, by selecting a card. With the card in hand, they are asked to focus on the imagery and music in the outpost. Visitors will then set their intentions for a future manifestation of that attribute.
Visionary Reality Outpost will be showing through August 18, 2019, at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wis. and it is part one of four exhibitions in the Kohler Arts Center's "Mise-en-Scène" exhibition series that features the work of contemporary artists who approach the world as a stage.