The primary recognized postcard printed as a memento might be traced to Vienna in 1871, adopted by commemorative playing cards for well-known occasions just like the completion of the Eiffel Tower in 1889 and the Chicago World’s Truthful in 1893. It wasn’t lengthy earlier than a trend for image postcards took the U.S. by storm all through the primary half of the twentieth century.
For David Opdyke, the long-lasting correspondences type the groundwork for an inventive apply analyzing capitalism, globalization, consumerism, and our fraught and more and more disconnected relationship with the setting. Often darkly humorous but steeped in a way of foreboding, his uncanny scenes recommend what sort of world we’d reside in we do nothing to stem the mounting local weather disaster.
Opdyke summons idyllic coastlines, nationwide parks, authorities monuments, wildlife, and civic infrastructure to weave “fractured yet cohesive topographies,” says Cristin Tierney Gallery, which is presenting the artist’s present solo exhibition, Ready for the Future.
For almost a decade, Opdyke has invoked the nostalgia of panorama postcards to interrogate the local weather emergency throughout the context of American politics and geographies. “Through these carefully altered compositions, Opdyke merges the past and the future, presenting both urgent and inevitable visions of environmental upheaval,” the gallery says.
The artist typically makes use of vintage playing cards that he purchases on eBay, portray scenes of environmental disasters or discordances between nature and structure. Alternating between cartoons and life-like portrayals of timber, animals, fires, and buildings, his compositions vary from single playing cards to wall-spanning assemblages, his gouache-painted particulars spreading from body to border.
In “Overlook,” for instance, large tentacles destroy bridges, rising sea water threatens cities, and big fires rage in institutional buildings. A dome encloses a metropolis, a rocket named Mars 2 heads for a brand new house within the photo voltaic system, and an airplane banner advertises “Technology Will Save Us” in a bleak but not unimaginable actuality fueled by techno-utopianism.
In his large-scale “Enough of Nature,” Opdyke transforms pure landscapes into encampment websites for these displaced from their properties, and parts of the general composition seem to dislodge from the primary grid as if floating away.
Caught tenuously between outmoded industrial practices, shifting societal worth programs, and a quickly evolving local weather disaster, Opdyke’s items level to once-idealized symbols of American progress to emphasize the hazards of ignoring our personal affect on the setting.
Ready for the Future underscores the precariousness of complacency, a “cautionary tale,” the gallery says, laying naked the fragility of our constructed setting.
The present continues by means of April 26 in New York Metropolis. Discover extra on the artist’s web site.
