Image: Frist Art Museum, Nashville
'Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman' opens September 25, 2026, at the Frist Art Museum’s Ingram Gallery and runs through January 3, 2027. The exhibition brings together 17 artists working with both analog and emergent technologies.
Their tools include digital animation, augmented and virtual reality, motion capture and generative software. Through these technologies, the artists challenge the view that human exceptionalism allows people to ignore the need to care for the more-than-human world.
Participating artists include Ian Cheng, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Marguerite Humeau, Josèfa Ntjam, Jacolby Satterwhite and Saya Woolfalk, among others. The exhibition addresses extinction, evolution, interspecies entanglement, metamorphosis, psychology and the philosophy of being.
Its first section takes a biological and ecological perspective, focusing on extinction, evolution and interspecies entanglement. The second section relates to psychology and includes playful stories of metamorphosis, while the third focuses on the philosophy of being.
Like the surrealists, these artists tap into the transformative agency of the marvelous, the uncanny and the unpredictable. In their fluid and floating creations, images morph, flicker and dance, forming psychologically charged archetypes within a new collective unconscious.
