There’s a sense of ominious vitality on the horizon, a shift in how historical past can be written, and we’ve got Umar Rashid proper within the thick of it. Again in 2021, he mentioned to us “The entire world is filled with standard misconceptions and horrible shit, and I simply carry it to mild in a really unfastened manner. I make it accessible as a result of if we’re at one another’s throats all of the goddamn time, if we’re all like, “Fuck you. You probably did this to me,” it is similar to old-fashioned feuding. And that has to finish.”
And now, 2024. Rashid opens The Kingdom of the Two Californias. La Época del Totalitarismo Half 2 at BLUM, the second installment in Rashid’s Epoch of Totalitarianism collection the place we rejoin “the artist’s fictional Frenglish conquerors—whose visible story the artist has authored for upwards of fifteen years—within the 1800s as they try to keep up a stronghold within the Americas.” We’re ripe for some fictional, alternate historical past in the meanwhile as the current appears unfathomable internationally, regardless of your political identification and precedence. Rashid empowering a rebellious spirit, a victory over oppression, and his distinctive manner of mixing identifiable historical past along with his personal world, feels refreshing in our local weather. If what we see in entrance of us looks like a story ripped from a distant historical past, why not make a brand new story up as a substitute? —Evan Pricco
