J.O.T.H. (Just Over the Horizon)

Dunes is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition J.O.T.H. (Just Over the Horizon), a solo show by Miles Huston. "Just Over The Horizon" - a common catch phrase among politicians, entrepreneurs and zealots, is often used to re-frame the future as a means to gather the collective energy of the moment. However, this allegory of a horizon, depicted from the ground looking as far as the eye can see, is often in direct contradiction to our spherical reality; what is just beyond the Horizon is only another horizon. It's a perpetual and paradoxical circle-of-life under capitalism that will swiftly erase the past for the promise of another 'new' future. It's within this never-ending loop of conflicting ideals, histories, assumptions, interpretations, that discussions about the anthropocene and our doomed little planet become so politically charged and confusing. Included in those erasures are the people and places of indigeneity that prove inconvenient to capital and power. But their narratives, imagery, myths, tools, and knowledge are re-inscribed in order to justify the project-of-the-moment's exceptionalism. A collection reaches for a common source. In the case of Huston's works, the common source is these exceptionalisms and their narratives. The emblems that serve to commemorate any given group's version of the Horizon, and are often seen as worthy of collecting, are flattened. They have become a reduction sauce of symbols that have folded and morphed over generations shifting between contradicting ideological sentiment - from corporate, to religious. What is it to commemorate, collect, own, autograph? Is a patent an autograph? Even the most mundane and prosaic of objects like watering cans contain within them these jumbled narratives, signifiers, and exceptions of horizontal expansionism - the domination and domestication of nature; the privatization of space and agriculture; the history of material design; the fetishization of collecting itself. Dunes is the first to show Huston's collection, 'Plantwater (2014-ongoing)', which is separated into three types of sculptural organization; 'Private(property)', 'Government(asset)', and 'Museum(collection)'. The compendium may be the largest known to ever tour the world. As with the wall pieces Bury the Hatchet and Return on Investment, Huston spotlights the colliding aesthetics of cooperation, the recycled emblems of authority. His collection reminds us that, with each new rotation of Earth and each new realized horizon, a less than polished version of our near-future fiction becomes generally accepted.