The Middle Future* by Public Fiction
Including the work of Math Bass, Leidy Churchman, Cécile B Evans, Stanya Kahn,

Nikita Gale, Anna Sew Hoy and Andrea Longacre-White.

The Middle Future is a publication made of flags, folded down into a book-form and “published”

(or “made public”) when hung. This “book” is meant to be, in the model of Aspen and many others of

its kind, a publication-as-an-exhibition, and a civic-minded mode of distribution.

On view at the American Academy in Rome until April 2016.

*The Middle Future:
In a climate of speculation and prophesy, the middle future holds a particular niche hovering

between idealism and disillusionment, opti- and pessi- isms. It is a time in the near present

at that perfectly soft-focus distance, that never really needs to sharpen in order to be effective.

Its effectiveness lies in the ability to keep us going, like getting clean, believing a

promise of change, or changing…

The Middle Future brings together, in reproduction, the work of artists who create new

signs out of existing signifiers, rearranged. Each one in its own way exposing a slip in meaning,

the failure of language to define a future in which opposites are obsolete, in which we live in a radical

center between fixed definitions, and need symbols that do not represent one pole or another, but rather a

higher middle.