Butcher Gallery is proud to present MANIFEST DESTINY, a two- person exhibition by Liam Wylie and Jillian Ross, as our first exhibition at our new location.

The term Manifest Destiny makes reference to the 19th century notion that the United States was destined to expand across the entire North American continent. It should be noted, however, that Manifest Destiny was always a far-reaching idea rather than a specific policy.

Liam Wylie and Jillian Ross propose a second coming of Manifest Destiny: a inexorable urge to colonize the twilight zone of our cyber surroundings staged on the internet, within electronic media, and making use of modern materiality.

Indeed, one can no longer ask questions about god, nature, life or death without first taking into account how cyber-technologies contribute to such questions. Today we pray online, we exist in online landscapes, we are born online as avatars and we die in such cyber-skins. In short, we – the pilgrims of the technological age - have developed a cyberculture. For author and cyberculture specialist Dr. David Bell, cyberculture is a “way of thinking about how people and digital technologies interact, how we live together” and it “refers to ways of life in cyberspace, or ways of life shaped by cyberspace”. This interconnection between digital technology and life suggested by the author means that, when thinking about cyberculture, one must also think about representations, meanings, and images: about the ways in which we assemble particular narratives about how these technologies have changed, are changing, or will change our lives. On virtual and physical planes, MANIFEST DESTINY will probe at this narrative structure in a drama that mirrors the events that played out on actual American planes two hundred years ago.

There is today a second-life that exists at the permeable boundaries between physicality and virtuality, fact and fiction, spirituality and science, myth and machine. As these age-old adversaries fall into flux, so too are our identities undergoing change. MANIFEST DESTINY blazes a trail into this new cyber-horizon before it falls beyond our reach.