Kiko Thomas — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Kiko Thomas

(Art MFA 25)
IG: @kikothomas

Motherboard: A new world awaits you, 2025

Kiko Thomas’s practice embodies “object making in fugitivity,” born from the artist’s lived experience as a nomadic painter. Thomas’s Motherboard: A new world awaits you is a kinetic sculpture and expanded installation driven by the artist’s research and inquiry into Boxtown in South Memphis, ground zero of an infamous public health crisis. Several miles from Boxtown sits Colossus, a supercomputer of unprecedented computing power, another manifestation of Elon Musk’s xAI unchecked ambitions. Massive unpermitted methane gas turbines pump thousands of tons of toxic fumes and exhaust into the area, harming residents’ lungs. The turbines compound the area’s existing struggles with the legacy of industrial pollution and environmental racism, living with gas pipelines, lead, oil, and fracking in their backyard. They can’t breathe. Through a provocatively engineered rotating form, sculptures, and projected video, Thomas’s installation speaks to the complex overlaps of technology’s unscrupulous promises. Viewers are invited to reflect on their own relationship with labor, automation, and myths and notions of intelligence. The main sculpture presents a balanced assemblage of a large wooden spool, seated atop elements of aerotransportation. On the floor, foam clay wood sculptures are seated in the spill of painted cloth towards a projection. The pedestal, wrapped in velvet, is intended as a stage; it supports a steel wire ‘wheel’ or carousel, which extends out in four directions, forming an X. At the end of each extension is a small rotating sculpture. The carousel is mounted with a painted plexiglass case.

At the base — in a subtle but clear rhetorical move — an aircraft chair supports the whole, with the emergency equipment exposed. The chair seems to be connected to a spindle of wire that rotates, and looks as if animating movement of both the X and the rotating sculptures. As a kinetic sculpture meant to mesmerize and enchant the viewer, the piece’s artifice and seamless illusion speaks directly to the breakneck reengineering of the environment in the seductive name of progress: a house of cards, a carefully constructed mythology. As the sculpture turns, we can imagine new myths of progress taking place of the old. Further symbolized here: artists’ fears over the possibilities of what AI will create and control, including the essence of creativity. Driven by an evangelist, gnostic priesthood in pursuit of a superintelligence that ‘outstrips’ the human, Boxtown is a case study of the technopositivist acceleration that is being replicated across the country (between several corporations, there are plans to build over 200 data centers in underserved neighborhoods and communities throughout the United States), and the world. In their pursuit of great intelligence, AI titans have exacerbated the old, layering atop the very labor inequities and environmental racism that carved America into zones of resource allocation. Motherboard grounds in the wake of environmental racism, civic activism, and the overlooked impact of AI’s energy use as it actively shapes our immediate future and what will endure.

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025