Review: “The Future Will Be Boiled, Printed, and Possibly Woven” – Las Vegas Art Exhibition by artists from the US, UK and ROW
by Eva Pascoe
Most people come to Las Vegas to gamble away their money, their dignity, and—if the blackjack tables run long enough—their mental health. But in a city built to overstimulate, this exhibition offers something radical: art as a repair shop for the mind. Zoe Camper and Julie Samuels show in Las Vegas Gallery lead the charge, turning questions about technology, society, and even the ethics of boiling water into playful provocations. Around them, a chorus of international artists weave sound, textiles, plastic, paper, and pixels into works that ask us not just to survive the stresses of modern life, but to do so creatively. In short, while the Strip is taking your chips, this gallery might just give you back your sanity.
Las Vegas has seen its fair share of spectacle, but this art show managed to serve up something stranger—and far more nourishing—than neon lights and Elvis’s impersonators.
Zoe Camper’s work had us contemplating the ethics of using nuclear fusion; using it to destroy civilisation versus using the energy from a nuclear power station to boil water in a kettle for the noble cause of a good cup of tea. Moral conclusion: the tea wins, but only just.
Her parallel worlds of dual-use tools reminded us that the same wrench can fix a bike or dismantle a social system, depending on the mood of its wielder. It’s not the tech; it is us where the problems originate. It is even more poignant for me as Zoe was one of our early Cyberia Cafe pioneers back in the mid-90s and has seen various technologies come and go, some revolutionary like HTML, but some just a passing fad like Wap mobile.
Julie Samuels offered an artwork based on her ancestors’ journey, a collaboration with a sound artist Dr Stace Constantinou (Northampton University). They created a companion to her work in the format of the audio of a ship’s journey, ancestor voices and other elements evoking the dark past. Julie also printed her artwork on fabric. As Zoe explained, they were imported to the USA as “tea towels” to ensure that Customers did not tax it as “imported fabric” (one of the charms of living under the extreme Tariff Regime of President Trump).
Diane Bush’s Barbie doll corpses, reshaped into a bold “W” for Women, proved that the pink plastic icon still has plenty to say on the status of women in contemporary America, provided you cut her into pieces first and wrap in a bandage.
In a sobering counterpoint, Dr. Ivan Pope layered prisoners’ numbers from Auschwitz victims into collages, images that demanded stillness and deep reflection from the gallery visitors.
Finally, a powerful mixed-media work revealed women as priestesses or seers, with the artist writing prompts to conjure generative AI images, then transitioning them to handprinted visions of a human body. The works examine the history of artistic technologies over time, blurring the boundary between algorithm and altar, a journey from AI generative art to handmade paper, created by the artist Nancy Good from scratch.
The show was, at heart, a love letter to creativity as a survival skill: what Zoe Camper calls Resilience through Creativity. Cybersalon was delighted to support the show and collaborate with RSA Fellows to deliver it in Las Vegas and in the Virtual Gallery. The artworks serve as a reminder that in the face of nuclear water boiling kettles, pink plastic Barbies versus patriarchy, and the noise of history, resilience may just be our most important art form.
