The Otherwise
When: January 17-March 29, 2025
Where: Stirek Gallery
Artists: LaJuné McMillian and Rodell Warner
“Return whole, my children, your eyes a constellation of stars. Full of the knowledge that I love you, that we are what we carry—the years, the nights, and the seconds, and all the spaces in between. It flows through us, flows from within us. This love cannot be stopped. It grows—and it must be free. The time to dream is a sacred thing. It heals, lifts us up. Every child, not just my own, needs it. Our world demands it. You’ve got to dream a future before you can build a future. Together, let us begin this dreaming awake.”
― Janelle Monáe, The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer
Engaging various machine-learned tools (both adapted and newly built), artists LaJuné McMillian and Rodell Warner are undertaking corrective and imaginative research around Black community and its impact on current cultural consciousness.
The Otherwise presents the work of these artists as a series of portals. These portals seek to transport visitors to speculative universes where they’ll encounter Black ancestors, imagined ecologies, alternate realities, and emancipatory futures.
The two artists’ practices leverage burgeoning technologies to dream simultaneously of the future and the past. The works in the exhibition were constructed through digital processes for scanning and rendering, lending a glimpse into McMillian and Warner’s mutual politics of care and intimacy. The results of their explorations exist at the nexus of fantasy and the real. The artworks’ foundations lay in the documentary impulses of scientists and historians but have been thoughtfully re-worked to represent possibilities that many material archives omit.
The Otherwise was made possible with generous support by Teiger Foundation and the Ting Tsung And Wei Fong Chao Foundation.
About the artists
LaJuné McMillian is a multidisciplinary artist and educator creating art that integrates performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question our current forms of communication. They are passionate about discovering, learning, manifesting, and stewarding spaces for liberated Black realities and the Black imagination. LaJuné believes in making by diving into, navigating, critiquing, and breaking systems and technologies that uphold systemic injustices to decommodify our bodies, undo our indoctrination, and make room for different ways of being.
McMillian has had the opportunity to show and speak about their work at Pioneer Works, National Sawdust, Leaders in Software and Art, Creative Tech Week, and Art & Code’s Weird Reality. They were previously the Director of Skating at Figure Skating in Harlem, where they integrated STEAM and figure skating to teach girls of color about movement and technology.
Rodell Warner is a Trinidadian artist working primarily in new media and photography. Rooted in the exploration of race, nature, and technologies of representation, his artworks draw on personal and institutional archives to rethink the past, and on digital processes to index emancipatory futures. His digital animations intervening in early photography from the Caribbean have been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario in the landmark exhibition Fragments of Epic Memory in 2022, and in 2024 in the solo exhibition Fictions More Precious at Big Medium in Austin, Texas. His digital animations using hand-drawn digital 3D renderings of plants he has encountered throughout his increasingly diasporic life are currently on show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) in the exhibition Sea Change, and have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei in NEXUS－Video and New Media Art from the Caribbean. Rodell works between Port of Spain in Trinidad, Kingston in Jamaica, and New York in the U.S.
Photography by Blake Brown, OSU PRAx.