The Otherwise
When: January 17-March 29, 2025
Where: Stirek Gallery
The Otherwise is a re-envisioning of our collective cultural archives and the histories they omit. Engaging various platforms for machine learning (both adapted and newly built), McMillian and Warner are undertaking corrective and imaginative research around Black community and its impact on current cultural consciousness. The artists are invested in the concept of “embodied technologies”, a method by which ancestral guidance is integral to their practices in both digital and material interactions. The Otherwise presents a series of portals, transporting visitors to a variety of speculative universes to encounter ancestors, imagined ecologies, alternate realities, and emancipatory futures.
The Otherwise is made possible by Teiger Foundation.
Artists: LaJuné McMillan and Rodell Warner
Image: Rodell Warner, Artificial Archive, SCRYING INTIMACIES, Hallucination 1
Rodell Warner, Artificial Archive, SCRYING INTIMACIES no.1
About the artists
LaJuné McMillan 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. LaJune 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 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 Austin, Texas in the U.S.