Future Is Present

Abstract

St. Louis artist Van McElwee’s Time Fork: World B (2020) is currently on exhibit at Laumeier Sculpture Park in Sunset Hills, Missouri. McElwee’s Augmented Reality (AR) installation is part of the park’s 2021 thematic exploration, The Future is Present: Art and Global Change, which runs through October 20, 2021. The park is displaying artist projects covering such topics as environmental crisis, tech waste, deforestation, astronomical phenomena, and alternative realities. McElwee’s electronic and video exhibitions have found audiences in London, Vienna, Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul, and other world capitals. His body of media art includes over one hundred single-channel video works, installations, and web projects. McElwee’s grants and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Independent Production Fund, a Regional Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, and a travel grant from the government of India. McElwee’s work has been exhibited extensively and is represented in the Kitchen Video Collection in New York City, and by Bruno David Gallery in St. Louis, Heure Exquise! in France, the Inter Media Art Institute in Germany, and LUX in London, UK. In a ten-year survey of his work, the curator of Anthology Film Archives, Andrew Lampert, wrote, “McElwee is an ultra-prolific digital pioneer of the highest order.”1 Our conversation took place at Laumeier Sculpture Park, by telephone, and by email over a period of several weeks in March 2021.