Where does one find refuge when the world continues to erode? Is it possible to reverse the damage that has been done? In their first solo exhibition in Chicago Notes from VEGA, visual and performance artist A.J. McClenon proposes a return to the ocean. Encompassing a range of mediums, including installation, collage, video, writing and performance, McClenon ruminates on the interconnected impacts of environmental destruction, capitalism and anti-Black violence. They grapple with what scholar Christina Sharpe understands as the weather, “a totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack... The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation... it produces new ecologies” (In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, 2015:75). For McClenon, the weather demands envisioning other possibilities of life and structures for survival.

Describing the VEGA series, McClenon writes, “In the year 2112, 63 years after the Post-Post-Post movement the government plans to execute its Universal Relocation Project, (URP), leaving earth in a machine large enough and fast enough to orbit a black hole. Meanwhile, three leading Black physicists Vega, Dr. Kramoris (aka D'Ram) and Dr. Dahnara Bekti (aka Nara), work together undercover with the Futurist Freedom Party (FFP) to secure technology for human life in earth's deep oceans for citizens left behind.”

Collages and drawings map onto the gallery walls, depicting life forms that blur the boundaries between human and animal, organic and inorganic matter. Fish teeth emerge from a skeletal human mouth, an eel pushes through an eye socket, scales replace skin. Each collage presents an ongoing experience of becoming, improvising and adapting to new ecologies. Nets cascade from the ceiling, hair and neon green fishing cords interwoven into the mesh. The hair signals modes of self-fashioning that Black people often draw on for practicality, pleasure and survival and braiding techniques used by enslaved Black communities in the Americas to map out escape routes. Each creates a wormhole, or a tunnel-like connection, to speculate on alternative temporalities. Fishing weights, hooks and chains suggest utility, which characterizes most of the materials McClenon includes in the show.

Baskets hang overhead, filled with aesthetic symbols of Black life and a world that once was, from Jordans to hymnals. They lead to an altar dedicated to the impacts of time, flanked on either side by two large black t-shirts. Hauntingly disembodied. Found footage of Black swimmers and excerpts of McClenon’s home videos project onto swim caps, linking VEGA to aquatic histories that have always been integral to Black communities. Below, stones sourced from Lake Michigan provide a sense of grounding, balancing the suspension that runs throughout so much of the exhibition.

Notes from Vega brings together different modes of McClenon’s practice into a narrative that has been developed since 2014. By offering viewers a glimpse into an aqueous future centered forged through Black thought, McClenon provides an opportunity to reflect both on the world we live in and worlds yet to come.