Seventeen artists will transform the Frist Art Museum in Nashville this autumn. Their exhibition, Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman, opens September 25 and runs through January 3, 2027.

The roster includes Ian Cheng, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Marguerite Humeau, Josèfa Ntjam, Jacolby Satterwhite and Saya Woolfalk, among others. Working with both analog and emergent technologies, they set out to visualize the interrelationship between humanity, other species and the earth itself.

The toolkit is expansive: digital animation, augmented and virtual reality, motion capture and generative software. The ambition behind it is pointed. According to the exhibition's materials, these artists challenge the view that human exceptionalism allows us to ignore the need to care for the more-than-human world.

There is a lineage here. Like the surrealists before them, the participating artists tap into the transformative agency of the marvelous, the uncanny and the unpredictable. In their fluid and floating creations, images morph, flicker and dance. The organizers describe these shifting forms as psychologically charged archetypes within a new collective unconscious.

For all its otherworldly moments of awe and enchantment, the exhibition remains grounded in real-world disciplines. It unfolds across three sections.

The first takes a biological and ecological perspective. Its subjects include extinction, evolution and interspecies entanglement — the hard science of a planet under pressure.

The second turns to psychology, presenting playful stories of metamorphosis. The curatorial framing is vivid: in this enchanted realm, people become microbes and slime, dreams become poetry, and robots become furious dancers. These transformations, the exhibition suggests, counter the pain of the world with vitality and joy.

The third section addresses ontology — the philosophy of being. Artists here bridge ancestral and contemporary belief systems, particularly those beyond modern Western traditions. Their instruments are new technologies; their goal is to reawaken humanity's sense of interconnectedness with the earth.

Mark Scala, Chief Curator at the Frist Art Museum, organized the exhibition.

The show's timing is deliberate rather than incidental. As artists increasingly work with generative and immersive tools, Shimmer offers a test case for whether those technologies can serve ecological and philosophical ends rather than spectacle alone. The January 3, 2027 closing date gives audiences a full season to judge.