This painting by Inka Essenhigh was created for the artist’s most recent solo exhibition, Uchronia, at Kavi Gupta gallery in Chicago. The show presented a vision of a hypothetical future in which humanity has resolved its troubled relationship with the ecosphere.

The goal of this body of work according to Essenhigh was not to present a complete picture of an idealized future, “but rather fragments where we have to wonder how much is symbolic, how much is abstracted, or how much is literal.”

Several of the works in the show, including The Blazing World, End of the World, and Fragments from a nature cult, 2087 C.E., seem to depict the in between times, as humanity is struggling with its relationship with a changing world and reconfiguring its association with the biosphere. In The Blazing World, we see humanoid forms sheltering themselves from a terrible source of illumination o heat as plant and animal forms seem to rise Phoenix-like in the chaos. Is this a representation of people sheltering themselves from the burning truth? Being scorched by the heat of an angry sun? Or being eradicated by nature so other life forms can thrive?

“This Uchronia may have problems,” Essenhigh says. “I’m not posing these pictures as definitive answers. I’m posing them as possibilities—a way to begin the conversation about what we want our future to look like.”