21c Cincinnati Presents: Hybridity

June 27–December 2014

The evolution of species and spaces in twenty-first century art explores the diminishing boundaries between human and animal kingdoms, recent advances in scientific technology, and the shifting environmental and economic conditions actively altering the Earth and its inhabitants. Employing photography, painting, sculpture, and video, and often incorporating repurposed commercial materials, including tires, safety barrels, matches, broken furniture, and discarded shoes, and more, the artists featured here create new breeds, including a two-headed ram, an embroidered cow, and a panoply of interspecies—genetic recombinants that are equal parts fact and fiction. While hybrids have been a staple of the collective cultural imagination for centuries, today their habitats are depicted as both natural and artificial. In the land and cityscapes presented here, nature meets technoculture, and the new natural is both organic and manufactured. Influenced by Surrealism, science, and a radically changed global economy, the artists of The New Frontier envision how the dreams and detritus of the industrial era have generated the promise and peril of the digital age, offering a provocative examination of how we shape and share our world.