DubbleX discusses Future Fears at Fountain House Gallery opening (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
FUTURES
Fountain House Gallery
702 Ninth Ave. at Forty-Eighth St.
Tuesday – Saturday through March 2, free, 12:00 – 6:00
212-262-2756
www.fountainhousegallery.org
www.artsy.net
In the nonprofit Art at a Time Like This, cofounders and independent curators Anne Verhallen and Barbara Pollack focus on twenty-first-century art that explores current events and the vast changes being experienced around the world every day. Pollack, author of Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise and The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic’s Adventures in China, looks to what’s next in “Futures,” continuing at Fountain House Gallery through March 2. The show features painting, sculpture, and installation by more than twenty artists living with mental illness. The works range from bright and hopeful to dark and foreboding. Alyson Vega’s fabric collage Dear Future… contains such phrases as “Our bad” and “Left a bit of a mess.” In Spirit of 2076, Issa Ibrahim reimagines Archibald M. Willard’s iconic Yankee Doodle (Spirit of ’76) painting of two drummers and a fife player in front of the American flag during the Revolutionary War as Wonder Woman, Superman, and Batman marching for the United States of McDonald’s. Susan Spangenberg is represented by three pieces: Mister Doomsday, in which a strange creature is holding a coffee cup that says “Have a Nice Day” and a sign that declares “The End Is Near”; Octomission, a colorful octopus blasting off; and the large-scale map of the moon, Space Farce, a collaboration with Ibrahim that includes familiar quotes and logos placed on the moon.
Boo Lynn Walsh shares her thoughts on the future in collage Chaos: History Repeats (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
“Post-2020, predicting the future is perhaps an antiquated game, given how the sudden onset of the pandemic surprised all prognosticators,” Pollack said in a statement. “Combining boundless imagination with low-tech materials, the artists of ‘Futures’ create a new way of dealing with our hopes, fears, and anxieties, conjuring visions that cannot be seen through telescopes or crystal balls. From apocalyptic nightmares to over-the-rainbow fantasies, the artworks in this exhibition underscore the limits of politicians, scientists, and astrologers to find a new way of envisioning imminent change. Only artists, like these, seem capable of creating images that are dynamic and capture the diversity of the future, or, more accurately, ‘futures,’ since this holds a different meaning for each.”
At the opening, several artists were on hand to discuss their work. Vermilion put on her blue Ceremonial Helmet, which gallery visitors cannot do, but you can spin her Compass, both of which are made of found materials; Boo Lynn Walsh offered everyone a chance to peer into her electronic wall sculpture Oracle of Artificial Enlightenment, and Ray Lopez talked about the sci-fi influences behind his watercolor Confessions into Another Porthole, in which a woman looks through a black hole in a blue circle, searching for something else. Most of the works are available for sale (some have already been sold), with prices ranging from $90 to $4,500.