When you imagine the future, do you have an optimistic view, or perhaps a darker one? The thought-provoking exhibit “Opposing Futures” at FATVillage Projects in Fort Lauderdale presents the visions of 20 artists or artist teams of what the future may hold. The exhibit encompasses a wide range of media, from traditional forms like painting and sculpture, to video, installation, and interactive art.
Dystopia or Utopia?
At a recent artist talk at the space, Leah Brown — one of the curators, along with Peter Symons and Elle Schorr — said the idea for the exhibit originated during an art walk, where there were two very different views of the world. One was dystopian: including political upheaval, war, environmental degradation, and “almost normalized apathy.” The other was utopian: a future of self-driving cars, longer life span, space travel, and ways to improve the planet. “There is something so important about a themed exhibit,” Schorr said, “as it can inspire a dialogue between the artists and the viewing public.”
A photographer who leads a monthly arts salon in West Palm Beach, Schorr said she feels like she is living her future. Her husband, Jerry Kornbluth, helped her to create her first installation ever. It greets visitors as they enter the exhibit, appearing as part of a living room with an array of future-focused fiction and non-fiction books hanging from the ceiling, such as Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock.” Jerry’s video of images related to the books comprises the living room wall. He also created a projection of pithy quotes that scroll as light on the gallery floor nearby. Schorr mused that when the book “1984” first came out, “It looked real scary. Well, that’s come and gone,” she said.
In another piece that involves a moving image, the video “Epoltisorm,” Symons used a custom algorithm to reorganize Fritz Lang’s classic film “Metropolis” by brightness instead of time. The piece is very trippy, giving the viewer the feeling of being in an alternate universe. It explores the idea of a non-linear experience, what Symons calls a “non-human method of storytelling.”
Concern for the Environment
The environment figures in quite a few of the works in the exhibit. Nature and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway (which preserves seeds to insure against their loss in crises) inspired Glass artist Fahan Sky McDonagh’s piece “Promise.” In it, she presents flameworked glass tubes containing nature elements she finds on walks. She adorns some with 24K gold leaf, to honor them. McDonagh says this piece is a comment on the fragility of the environment. “I’m not 100% optimistic,” she adds. “I keep finding things trashed over.”
Laurencia Strauss invites us to think about the environment in her piece “Speculative Offshore Futures (CFDs).” A large horizontal island that hangs above some viewers’ eye level, it addresses the alarming proposition that parts of Florida will one day be under water. It depicts what Strauss, an artist trained as a landscape architect, calls an “imaginery impossible solution” to the problem of sea level rise. We see cast plaster replicas of decommissioned cruise ships docked at the edges of an island built to the scale of Key West. The ships support the island and prevent it from becoming submerged, “so people don’t have to move.”
Painter Shannon Ellis’s work also addresses the rising sea level threat. Her painting “Oceanfront” shows a landscape in which rising water submerges buildings. Her process itself suggests the way a refusal to heed the climate change warnings may result in a flooded landscape. For example, she applied the paint extravagantly as a statement on our extravagant use of resources. And she used metallic metal leaf for the sky, so that it would look toxic and unhealthy.
Delivering the Message
Especially moving is the interactive exhibit “Erased Drawings” by Kim Heise and Ingrid Barreneche. The artists designed it to give visitors a personal experience of how climate change is endangering hundreds of plant, animal, and insect species, and how things will only get worse in the future. The piece includes a videotape of visitors as each one takes up the artists’ invitation to erase one of many drawings of a Florida native species. When they do so, only a watercolor silhouette of that plant, animal or insect remains.
The exhibit’s closing reception is on June 24, from 6 to 10 p.m., at 521 NW 1st avenue, Fort Lauderdale.
