In the Fall of 2008, during the formation of In Anticipation, the major social, political and economic shifts occurring were impossible to ignore. The world watched intently as the economic recession became global, leaving many jobless and homeless, the urgency of the earth's environmental condition became irrefutable, and here in the United States the tangible desire for political change resulted in the most historic presidential election in generations. Uncertainty left many longing to make sense of the future and to speculate about the unknown.

As a response to these suspenseful circumstances, In Anticipation is a collaboration that reflects the condition of anticipation by developing a closer engagement with multi-media proposals and unrealized works by Elizabeth Axtman, Fang Lu, Jillian Mcdonald, Aernout Mik and Kamau Amu Patton. In order to address significant aspects within this contemporary moment, each artist was commissioned to engage with one of five interrelated inquiries that belong to both art discourse and other spheres of experience. These inquiries are titled as Question of Truth, Friction, Metamorphosis, Re-enactments, and Alternate Realities and dually function to activate a deeper understanding of the artists' practice as well.

The provocative ideas contained in each sub-theme and the outcome of the proposals hinge on the viewer's imagination and participation. Through three interconnected sites including a website, a live event, and limited edition artist prints, each artist proposal is given a suggestive space where the project can engage the viewer in the act of making predictions without any promise of resolution. While In Anticipation is largely situated in the realm of the unknown, the entire project is intended to mirror the multiple states of anticipation that persist as conditions of the present time.

QUESTION OF TRUTH
g Lu is an artist who works from two cultural locales, San Francisco and Beijing. Her work reveals the friction and absurdity that arise from the intersection of biological and geographical concepts of identity as they are mediated through various internet and media platforms.

METAMORPHOSIS
Jillian Mcdonald directs the process of metamorphosis by defying all anticipatory energies through one eerie and unexpected climatic moment. The New York-based artist physically embodies the fusion between between performance, media, and art.

RE-ENACTMENTS
Dutch artist Aernout Mik's work is often staged in the midst of crisis or conflict, when the lead up to these situations, and also their aftermaths, are undisclosed. Any sense of anticipation is thus destablized, as the absence of a before and after context complicates the logic of expectation. In his re-enactments of bedlam or contentious relations, without a plot to go on, and disoriented by the spectacle of noise and drama, even close attention to the scene's nuancies and idiosyncracies is hardly helpful in trying to decipher meanings.

ALTERNATE REALITIES
The concept of Alternate Realities as a project inquiry draws attention to the theory and study of narrative structures and the way they affect perception. As one of the five loci, Alternate Realities engages the experience of structured information as it appears in multiple realms including both virtual and actual reality.