MARCH 13-JUNE 10, 2026
EXHIBITION ARTISTS
Portland, Oregon-based transdisciplinary artist Demian DinéYazhi’ makes work that disrupts structures of power through interventions, installation, written word, and performance. Their practice contemplates ways a marginalized body navigates and resists assimilation. For Memory of a Future Once Imagined, SVMoA and the exhibition curator worked with DinéYazhi’ to create a site-specific neon installation for the museum’s front window considering time, renewal, resistance, and Indigenous futures.
Anishinaabe and French artist Caroline Monnet works across multiple disciplines including film, installation, 3D printing, and fashion. Based in Montreal, Monnet’s practice communicates complex ideas on bicultural existence and Indigenous identity and lifeways. She seeks to unsettle outdated systems and install Indigenous methodological approaches. Monnet often employs industrial materials, and references to popular and traditional culture. The exhibition includes a new short film, PIDIKWE, a wearable textile sculpture, and two-dimensional works that reference the Anishinaabe practice of birch bark biting, translating the traditional artistic practice into contemporary form.
Dallas-based Adnan Razvi is a Ugandan Pakistani American multidisciplinary artist exploring themes related to memory, history, ecology, water, migration, societal connection, identity, and joy. Memory of a Future Once Imagined includes large-scale works from Razvi’s ongoing series, MAWIMBI To make the works, Razvi travels globally, visiting bodies of water to create multi-dimensional paintings on linen. His process involves direct interaction with the waterways and natural environments, where he layers and builds the artwork by using elements like sediment from the water and earth. The resulting works are abstract, textured representations of bodies of water on the canvas, metaphors for the movement of peoples throughout the world. Additionally, Razvi’s collaborative video installation with Dallas-based Taylor Cleveland animates the MAWIMBI work, blending elements of futurism, documentation, and movement across time and space.
Based between Dublin and Berlin, Laura Skehan is a visual artist working in moving image, sound, and sculptural installation. She dissects the intricate rhizomatic structures embedded in our human relationship to the natural world, connecting her work with forms in nature with philosophical and
political histories. Her projects explore the conditions of and our responses to the natural world. Her new work, In the Absence of Resolution, We Break Bread, premiering in Memory of a Future Once Imagined incorporates recordings made during small dinner gatherings in Berlin into a sound and light installation highlighting foodways, migrated histories of sustenance and subsistence, and the impacts of colonization on cultures.
Los Angeles-based artist Rodrigo Valenzuela works across photography, video, and installation, and is an Assistant Professor and Head of the Photography department at UCLA. Valenzuela, who was born in Chile and worked as a day laborer after his arrival in the U.S., redresses histories and realities of labor and its construct with the history of art and architecture, often utilizing simple building materials including scaffolding, wooden pallets, metal, pipes, and cinderblocks in creating studio scenes. Valenzuela’s installation Future Ruins depicts assembled, imagined ruins and blurs the line between the perception of photography as a documentary medium with inherent truth to it versus photography as the construction of an image and a vehicle for creating invented narratives.
RELATED PROGRAMS
EXHIBITION OPENING CELEBRATION AND PRINTMAKING ACTIVATION WITH ARTISTS DEMIAN DINÉYAZHI’ AND PAUL MULLOWNEY
Fri, Mar 13, 5-7pm Sun Valley Museum of Art Free
During the Exhibition Opening, join Demian DinéYazhi’ and Paul Mullowney of Portland-based Mullowney Printing Company for a community printmaking activity. Together, participants will develop language for a broadside that will be distributed to visitors during the run of the exhibition.
PANEL DISCUSSION: CURATOR ERIN JOYCE IN CONVERSATION WITH ARTISTS DEMIAN DINÉYAZHI’, ADNAN RAZVI, LAURA SKEHAN, AND RODRIGO VALENZUELA
Sat, Mar 14, 10am Sun Valley Museum of Art Free
EVENING EXHIBITION TOURS Thu, Mar 19, Apr 16, May 21, 5:30pm Sun Valley Museum of Art Free
ART ON FILM: A REVOLUTION ON CANVAS Wed, Apr 1, 5pm Merlin’s Magic Lantern $10 member / $12 nonmember In her directorial debut, Sara Nodjoumi investigates the mysterious disappearance of more than 100 “treasonous” paintings by her father, well-known Iranian artist Nickzad Nodjoumi.
FIRST FRIDAYS: DAMIAN RODRIGUEZ Fri, Apr 3, 5-7pm Sun Valley Museum of Art Free
The third and final exhibition in Sun Valley Museum of Art’s series Landscapes of Migration, Memory of a Future
Once Imagined looks to consider the intersection of movement across time, space, and land. Focusing on migration, memory, nostalgia, and understandings of time, the exhibition and its participating artists work to challenge imposed Western ideas of linear time and instead embrace expansive continuums of time and culture as a response to histories of human movement.
The exhibition features photographic installation, video, sound installation, painting, and sculpture, including newly commissioned works by Demian DinéYazhi’ and Laura Skehan. Working across a diverse set of histories, geographies, and mediums, each of the artists investigates ancestral memory as not something of the past, but a living entity that informs present and future moments.
Guest Curator Erin Joyce
