Toward Emergent Futures brings together work by four artists who consider the future from distinct vantage points, approaching it as a space shaped by the patterns of the present. Their practices respond to a moment marked by global instability, climate disruption, and widening social inequities, conditions that often obscure a clear sense of promise for tomorrow.
Judy Anderson uses copper jingles and moose hide to reflect on how tradition can be carried forward even as it evolves, and centres on the transformative potential of Indigenous presence within institutional spaces. Christina Battle’s projects are rooted in the present and recent past, looking toward the not-so-distant future. She considers how saving seeds can reshape systems of exchange and ecological wellbeing, and creates animated GIFs to reflect on how news cycles frame and reframe our understanding of what lies ahead. Collaborators Naomi Okabe and Emily Pelstring project into the distant future, casting themselves as “Technomystics” in a post-collapse era research lab, where ecological grief is translated into data and preserved for later processing.
Across the exhibition, their works acknowledge the gravity of current realities while also proposing that the future remains open to revision, shaped by practices that support communities and invite speculation about what could be.
Judy Anderson is nêhiyaw from Gordon First Nation, Treaty 4, Saskatchewan. Her practice includes beadwork, quillwork, installation, three-dimensional pieces, painting, and collaborative projects; her work focuses on spirituality, family, colonization, decolonization, and nêhiyaw ways of knowing and being. Her current work is created with the purpose of honouring people in her life and nêhiyaw intellectualizations of the world. She is a Professor of Canadian Indigenous Studio Art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Calgary.
Christina Battle is an artist, curator, and writer based in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton), within the Aspen Parkland: the transition zone where prairie and forest meet. Her practice focuses on thinking deeply about the concept of disaster: its complexity, and the intricacies entwined within it. She looks to disaster as a series of intersecting processes including social, environmental, cultural, political, and economic, which are implicated not only in how disaster is caused but also in how it manifests, is responded to, and overcome.
Battle’s practice prioritizes collaboration, experimentation, and failure; she has exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries as both artist and curator.
Naomi Okabe is a Canadian media artist, writer, and creative researcher working at the intersection of documentary and science fiction storytelling. Her films have premiered at festivals such as Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival, Kingston Canadian Film Festival, and the Science New Wave Festival, and her creative work has been funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and commissioned by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Naomi is currently pursuing a PhD in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies in Film and Media at Queen’s University, where she is thinking about technologies of care. Her writing is forthcoming in Predictions by Mattering Press, Palgrave Macmillan, and KOSMICA Magazine. Naomi also co-runs Séance Centre, a record label and publisher.
Emily Pelstring is faculty in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University. Her creative work has been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council. She uses surreal and idiosyncratic storytelling to explore links between technology, spirituality, and illusion, bringing together interests in reclaimative myth-making, speculative futurisms, and camp aesthetics. Her animations and installations incorporate analog and digital effects processes. Emily is engaged in ongoing artistic collaborations with Jessica Mensch and Katherine Kline under the moniker The Powers, and was a core organizer of an international symposium called The Witch Institute.
