Approximately Infinite Universe

Seventeen artists are featured in the current Approximately Infinite Universe exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla. Among them are Andrea Bowers and Yoko Ono. Ideas of science fiction writers are incorporated into specific artwork, particularly science fiction ideas of the 1960s and ’70s, which were fertile times for imaginative novelists and non-fiction writers. In the current show, artists rethink set cultural categories and question habitual ways of thinking. Try referencing Ursula K Le Guin’s social and political ideas alongside those of the more popular culture Star Trek. No passive viewing here. At MCASD visitors are challenged to imagine alternative forms of the past and future.

 

The take away from this show is that presenting artists borrow from a sizable core of science fiction, but they also create their own versions of the genre. Cities of the future, utopia and dystopia, aliens and cyborgs, and reproductive technologies are only some of the elements of a show that manipulates media to move backward and forward through time. It’s art as a kind of time travel. Catch this engrossing show in the next couple of months because it closes September 1. (858.454.3541 www.mcasd.org)    DARLENE G. DAVIES