Future /sa瑟t/
Celebrating 40 Years of the Tarble
On view Sept. 23 鈥 Dec. 10, 2022; Studio Gallery
One of the Tarble鈥檚 two inaugural exhibitions in 1982 was an installation of black-and-white photography capturing various stages of the museum鈥檚 construction. Taken by 麻豆国产鈥檚 staff photographer Gene Wingler, these photographs documented the process by which physical space was transformed over time. For the Table鈥檚 40th anniversary, we are revisiting a body of work that was itself a look back in time to a plot of land becoming a museum, one site yielding itself into another.
Visible in several of the pictures is a sign reading, 鈥淔UTURE SITE . . . Tarble Arts Center,鈥 which anticipates a new structure (building, noun) by signaling the physical work of the same name (building, verb). Inasmuch as 鈥淔UTURE SITE鈥 invites us to project ourselves forward in time and envision pure possibility鈥攖hat is, to have futuresight鈥攕uch imagining entails a coequal responsibility to look back, hindsight, and reflect on the present as what had once been the future. From where have we come, and where will we go from here?