American Artist, film still from The Monophobic Response, 2024.
How do imagined futures shape today's realities? In The Monophobic Response, American Artist presents a two-channel film installation reimagining a pivotal 1936 rocket engine test that launched the U.S. space program. The exhibition does not historically reenact, but instead explores the spiritual and political motivations behind contemporary desires to abandon Earth by opening an alternative history inspired by Octavia E. Butler's 1993 novel Parable of the Sower. Enacted with actors playing Butler's protagonists, and filmed in the Mojave Desert with an actual rocket test fire, the film draws haunting parallels between Butler's prescient visions and today's actualities—asking whether our cosmic ambitions can transcend the colonial logics of extraction and escape, or whether we are destined to carry the patterns of Earth's destruction to the stars.