“Tomorrowland” Exhibition

Greenpoint Terminal Gallery

This event has ended.

Curated by Brian Willmont & Alison Sirico

Greenpoint Terminal Gallery presents Tomorrowland featuring new work by Michael Dotson, Ben Phelan, and Anne Vieux. The work in the exhibition is tied together through its otherworldliness and futuristic surreality achieved bilaterally through subject matter and use of material. The title, Tomorrowland, is open to interpretation. It could represent the future-tense, psychedelic jumps, technologic insight, or (literally) to the part of the park in Disney’s Magic Kingdom that centralizes around the Space Age. Understanding that imagination is fed by science & technology and science & technology is fed by imagination, Disney described Tomorrowland’s design as an opportunity to participate in present adventures that are a living blueprint to tomorrow. The show reflects upon his invitation.

Acknowledgement of time and utilization of contemporary technology are important cross sections of the work. Inspired directly from Disney, Michael Dotson, studies keyframes and appropriates animated imagery, deconstructing and reconfiguring well-known characters. The films could be left as mired pictures. However, he describes his attraction to the imagery as a reaction to the contemporary; the original images are recycled in popular culture through memes and Tumblr posts. His reassemblement of the images in Photoshop, thereafter air brushed onto panel, brings the familiar into a futuristic uncharted sphere. The paintings are conceived by today’s digital design tools, but the way in which he reconfigures the paintings recontextualizes them outside of modernity. It’s possible that they could be alien dissections of contemporary animation or what Disney might look like in the future.

Anne Vieuxs’ artwork similarly exemplifies a straddle of time. In pursuit of exploring light and virtual space, she scans in images, printing them onto faux suede before painting back into them creating documentations that exist simultaneously between a digital and physical realm. She notes that the images have the potential to slow down virtual space and speed up the painting space, and that the process produces a product that exists in both worlds withholding modern referent.

Ben Phelan’s favored material, polystyrene styrofoam has a complex longevity. The material is a technology commonly used in short lived disposable products and has a speculated million-year lifespan. The work is a reflection of the material, its consumption, and demonstrates how technology can inspire form. Of his investment in the subject, Phelan notes, “the work operates as a type of industrial mimicry, producing inverted monumental sculpture in service of instantaneous consumption.” The outcome is a machine manufactured, artist hand singularity that renders extraterrestrial forms.

Aesthetically, like the park itself, all the work in Tomorrowland is rooted in its visionary and transcendental design. It asks the questions: within the timeframe of… say the material styrofoam…, Could these visions of futuristic design become popularized in a forthcoming modernity? And can we create objects that concurrently imagine the future, drop seeds into the present, and build windows into the past?