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Daniel Tucker / Future Perfect: Time Capsules in Reagan Country

Large round bronze object on pedestal in the lobby of the Giffith Park Observatory. Object is a time capsule.

September 7 – November 17, 2024

Daniel Tucker’s 2015 work Future Perfect: Time Capsules in Reagan Country grows out of an interest in the continued echoes of a speech delivered by Reagan following the end of his Governorship in California on August 19th, 1976 at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri. In this speech, Reagan talks of the difficulty he found in writing a letter for a time capsule to be sealed in Los Angeles and opened one hundred years in the future. Departing from this moment Future Perfect explores Reagan’s future-oriented science fiction imagination and rhetoric through visits to Reagan-inspired monuments and time capsules throughout California. Directed by Daniel Tucker, Edited by Valerie Keller, Additional Camera: Emily Forman and Steve Rowell, Music: Tim Kinsella and Todd Mattei. The video was the subject of a profile in the Baffler Magazine by Rick Pearlstein and has been screened at Veggie Cloud (LA), Grand Central Art Center (Santa Ana), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Slought (Philadelphia), Visual Studies Workshop [Rochester, NY], Interference Archive (Brooklyn NY), Spaces (Cleveland), and the Galleries at Moore (Philadelphia).

SANTA ANA TEN-YEAR TIME CAPSULE

On Saturday, September 7th, GCAC, Daniel Tucker, and Santa Ana Histories Room Original Collaborator Manny Escamilla unlocked and opened the ten-year Santa Ana Time Capsule. The capsule had been installed above the Gallery Store at Grand Central Art Center,since it was first developed in 2014, through artist Daniel Tucker’s GCAC artist-in-residence. The event was kicked off with a reading of a letter to the future by Manny Escamilla, who co-organized the 2014 time capsule with the Santa Ana Public Library History Room. The reading was followed by a discussion between Tucker and Rosten Woo about the video Future Perfect: Time Capsules in Reagan Country on display in the gallery, which documents the creation of the time capsule.. Concluding the evening, the time capsule was opened with those who has placed original object and the contents displayed in the Grand Central Art Center gallery which will remain in the gallery until November 17..

Daniel Tucker’s project Future Perfect was developed through a GCAC Artist-in-Residence, supported in part by a grant to Grand Central Art Center from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.