Continuing through September 14, 2026

Flipping the switch on perception is hardly new to the history of art. From Bosch’s confabulations of Hell and Holbein’s anamorphic skulls, toMarcel Duchamp’s bicycle wheel and M. C. Escher’s impossible architectural labyrinths, artists have long challenged Western civilization’s certainty of knowledge, perception and classification. Miljohn Ruperto pushes this tradition of irrationalism into distinctly twenty-first-century terrain, where virtual reality, artificial intelligence, ecological collapse, and technological mediation destabilize not only what we see, but the very conditions through which reality is constructed. Working at the intersection of art, philosophy, and science, Ruperto often collaborates with animators, astronomers, and neuroscientists.

When we enter Ruperto’s mid-career retrospective, we are drawn into a dreamlike realm where the boundaries of reality begin to dissolve. Against the gallery’s dark gallery walls, Ruperto’s immersive convergence of photography, sculpture, and digital animation creates an atmosphere in which matter appears perpetually mutable. Fixed systems of order give way to ambiguity, and the certainty of perception becomes increasingly questionable.

“Janus,” a three-minute animation, draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of the duck-rabbit, an image that can be seen either as a duck or a rabbit depending on how we look at it. For Wittgenstein, perception could never be purely objective; it is shaped by language, thought, and context. Ruperto extends this idea by combining it with Erwin Schrödinger’s cat, a 1935 thought paradox in which a cat ‘logically’ exists in a simultaneous state of life and death. In “Janus,” a bleeding rabbit and grasping duck oscillate between life and death, certainty and doubt. The work undermines fixed categories of meaning, collapsing distinctions between reality and projection, vitality and decay.

At the conceptual core of the exhibition — and the source of its title — are the eight-channel video installation, “Mineral Monsters,” and the AI-generated print series “Fathoms (Tartarapelagic).” Both multi-unit works interrogate conceptual systems of hierarchy and classification that place humans at the apex, followed by animals, plants, and finally inert minerals. One thinks, too, of the medieval Christian Great Chain of Being, a fusion of the Bible and Plato. In Ruperto’s fluid, metamorphic universe, however, minerals are anything but inert objects at the bottom of the chain. In “Mineral Monsters,” they glow, pulse, quiver and mutate, thus pushing beyond conventional natural taxonomy. One form resembles a beating human heart; another evokes a translucent drifting jellyfish. The distinctions between mineral, organism, and machine begin to collapse.

Similarly, “Fathoms (Tartaropelagic)” depicts ghostly sea creatures that emerge from and dissolve back into darkness, hovering between visibility and disappearance. (‘Tartaropelagic’ means deep sea; Tartaros was a fiery pit beneath Hades, in Greek mythology, while ‘pelagic’ refers to the open ocean.) Echoing Schrödinger’s cat paradox, Ruperto posits whether these entities exist independently or only come into being through the mediation of emergent technologies. Developed in dialogue with the artist and media theorist Daniel R. Small, the series obscures distinctions between discovery and invention, suggesting that technological perception may not simply reveal hidden worlds, but actively produce them.

Ruperto persistently disrupts entrenched concepts of reality, questioning not only what we see and experience but, more fundamentally, what constitutes life and death. Rather than presenting existence as a stable dynamic with humans at its center, Ruperto imagines reality as a fluid network of interdependent forms in continual transformation, where life operates within recursive cycles of decay and regeneration.

In “The Corpse” (2024), a ceramic sculpture created in collaboration with Candice Lin, predator and prey merge into a fossilized mass of entrails, bones, and skin. Within the hollow cavities of the form, an animated drawing of the head of John the Baptist rolls endlessly in a loop. The saint’s severed head — simultaneously dead and animated, like Schrödinger’s cat — becomes a symbol of transformation. Here, putrefaction is not merely an end state, but a generative process: decay functions as a mechanism through which new life, movement, and meaning emerge.

This idea extends into “What God Hath Wrought (Kairos),” from his larger series “The Great Disappointment” (whose title is derived from a nineteenth-century religious movement that predicted the end of the world). The series explores Ruperto’s recurring fascination with failed systems of belief, whether scientific, political or spiritual. “What God Hath Wrought (Kairos)” borrows its title from the first message transmitted by Samuel Morse’s telegraph — the biblical “What hath God wrought.” The work reflects on a moment in which technology transformed humanity’s understanding of time and communication. Yet Ruperto complicates the narrative of progress by infusing it with a profound sense of dread and collapse. 

“What God Hath Wrought” places us inside virtual reality versions of Thomas Cole’s romantic nineteenth-century Amerian landscape paintings. Through intricately detailed 3D models, Ruperto reimagines Cole’s scenes and the ideology of Manifest Destiny that undergirded them. The nineteenth century belief in boundless expansion and technological progress emerges here as its own kind of virtual reality — a seductive illusion constructed from art, myth, and a nationalist tenet. The work is a tour de force, bringing Cole’s painted landscapes to life before slowly unraveling into a meditation on entitlement, expansionism, and collapse. Rather than treating apocalypse as a singular catastrophic event, Ruperto imagines it as an ongoing cycle where destruction and renewal continually fold into one another.  As in “The Corpse,” the final work in “Animal, Vegetable, nor Mineral,” decay and transformation are not just inseparable, but together create new and unforeseen configurations.