PROLOGUE: Memories of Our Future – Shane Guffogg
When we dream of the future, we often forget that it is already here—unfolding all around us at lightning speed. At the same time, its changes arrive so gradually that we barely notice. We worry about how the future might strip away our lives or sense of purpose, yet the truth is that we are already living within it.
This morning, while walking my dogs, I was struck by this realization—moving from one patch of grass to the next, pausing beneath the scent of trees. At five years old, I could never have imagined bicycles that power themselves, or cars that drive without human hands. And yet today, self-driving cars drive along the streets with paying passengers inside, their engines soft as elevator music. Phones seem to know us better than we know ourselves. Machines have replaced radios, typewriters, and even fragments of our own thinking. We speak to these devices, and they answer back—drafting essays, completing tasks, and anticipating our needs with uncanny precision.
We no longer dial phones. Children can earn more than their parents. Electric bicycles carry us without a single pedal stroke. Robots vacuum our homes. Drones deliver our packages. We’ve even lived through the specter of viral warfare. Currency itself slips away as governments guide us toward cards and digital wallets. And still, the machines keep learning, correcting, rewriting—even as I write these words. What once required paper, ribbon, or ink now requires only breath, as spoken words become text, and artificial intelligence reshapes it with speed and fluency I could never have imagined.
We are living in the modern world. And yet, amidst all this convenience, something essential slips quietly away. Our need to feel, to think deeply, risks being dulled. Emotions drift into vacant spaces within us. Relationships wither, sometimes even within families. The decline of Western civilization is not only visible in books or politics—it is etched silently into our inability to truly communicate with one another.
I grew up playing barefoot in the dirt, watching ant colonies, making mud pies, riding horses, setting up lemonade stands, and dancing in the rain. Today, children grow up indoors, behind screens. They seldom play in the earth, fearing germs, and their immune systems suffer for it. Fear replaces resilience, and simple human experiences slip out of reach. Parents, in turn, live through their children, hoping this next generation might bypass the mistakes of their own.
We have already lived beyond what I once understood this world to be, and it continues to evolve into another layer of precision. But one thing remains malleable—art. Art can now be fabricated in endless ways, but is it still art when it loses its soul? Driving through Beverly Hills recently, I saw large-scale fabricated works of public art. They stood in place but said nothing to me. I longed instead to rest my eyes on a simple hedge, a living plant, something that breathes. What artists still believe in creating from a place of necessity, from the depths of identity, from the void that has followed us since the Dark Ages?
When was the last time you entered a museum or gallery and encountered a body of work that was truly engaging—something that allowed you to transcend time and space? Not art that collapses into politics or spectacle, but art that leaves you weightless, suspended in wonder, untethered to the clock.
This is where Shane Guffogg’s paintings begin.
- Victoria Chapman Los Angeles, August 14, 2025
A Personal Reflection: memories of our future - Shane Guffogg
Memories of our Future is the title of Shane Guffogg’s exhibition, opening September 2nd at Gallery Chang in Seoul. This will be his second solo exhibition at the gallery in Seoul, following his earlier exhibition in New york city. His career, international in reach, continues to weave itself across continents, yet the roots of his inquiry always circle back to a singular terrain: time, perception, and the unseen forces that shape our consciousness.
Standing before these paintings, I thought about what Guffogg had shared with me—that he had been thinking about the James Webb Space Telescope, and how its images had begun to inform this new body of work. His canvases, layered with translucent glazes, are not fixed images but portals—openings through which we peer backward, forward, and sideways in time. Unlike Cubism, which fractured perspective into simultaneous viewpoints, Guffogg fractures time itself. To look at these works is to enter a simultaneity of presence: the trace of yesterday, the shadow of today, and the shimmer of tomorrow, all trembling together on the same surface.
In conversation, Guffogg explained, “You can look into the past to recognize this moment, and then hopefully understand your future.” He went on to say that the Webb images—where stars appear both forming and dissolving within vast nebulae—had shifted his own thinking. “It made me realize that time isn’t linear,” he said. “The past is what we are seeing now. Each mark, each glaze, is both memory and possibility. It’s a way of piercing through time, of experiencing multiple moments all at once.”
Perhaps this is why his life on the ranch feels so essential to his practice. Surrounded by vineyards, olive trees, and open farmland, he is attuned to rhythms: the swell of storms, the turning of seasons, the fertility of soil. These are the same patterns the cosmos knows, transposed to the human hand. In his paintings, ribbons of color bend and weave like refracted light waves. They are made of sound as much as pigment, for Guffogg’s synesthesia translates hue into music. Each mark carries both visual and auditory resonance, a hidden score embedded in paint.
When I sit with these works, I imagine entering a cave of light, a kaleidoscope that is not artificial but elemental. Shadows dissolve into veils; veils dissolve into translucency. Nothing holds. Flux reigns, and yet presence endures.
As I remarked on this sense of entering another dimension, Guffogg replied: “That’s because everything is in a state of flux. We, as viewers, get to witness sight in multiple moments at once. It’s not perspective—it’s presence across time.”
Where Webb gazes outward into infinite expanses, Guffogg turns that same gaze inward—toward the cosmos of memory, dream, and possibility.
In the end, Memories of our Future is neither nostalgia nor prophecy. It is an invitation to inhabit the fragile present moment where dimensions converge, where light becomes color and color becomes sound. Through discipline and intuition, Guffogg asks us to imagine a future already within us. Like Webb’s mirrors catching ancient starlight, his paintings remind us of a profound truth: we are both memory and future, folded together in the luminous fabric of now.
Victoria Chapman
Los Angeles, August 14, 2025
Shane Guffogg’s Memories of our future runs until october 10th, 2025 at Gallery Chang, seoul
Photo credit: Victoria chapman