'Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman' to Open at the Frist Art Museum[f1][f2]

'Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman' opens September 25, 2026, at the Frist Art Museum’s Ingram Gallery and runs through January 3, 2027.[f1] The exhibition brings together 17 artists working with both analog and emergent technologies.[f2]

Their tools include digital animation, augmented and virtual reality, motion capture and generative software.[f3] 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.[f3]

Participating artists include Ian Cheng, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Marguerite Humeau, Josèfa Ntjam, Jacolby Satterwhite and Saya Woolfalk, among others.[f5] The exhibition addresses extinction, evolution, interspecies entanglement, metamorphosis, psychology and the philosophy of being.[f4]

Its first section takes a biological and ecological perspective, focusing on extinction, evolution and interspecies entanglement.[f6] The second section relates to psychology and includes playful stories of metamorphosis, while the third focuses on the philosophy of being.[f6]

Like the surrealists, these artists tap into the transformative agency of the marvelous, the uncanny and the unpredictable.[f7] In their fluid and floating creations, images morph, flicker and dance, forming psychologically charged archetypes within a new collective unconscious.[f8]