The primary identified postcard printed as a souvenir could 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 kind the groundwork for a creative observe analyzing capitalism, globalization, consumerism, and our fraught and more and more disconnected relationship with the surroundings. Sometimes darkly humorous but steeped in a way of foreboding, his uncanny scenes recommend what sort of world we’d dwell in if 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 but 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. “By means of these rigorously altered compositions, Opdyke merges the previous and the longer term, presenting each pressing and inevitable visions of environmental upheaval,” the gallery says.
The artist usually 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 bushes, animals, fires, and constructions, his compositions vary from single playing cards to wall-spanning assemblages, his gouache-painted particulars spreading from body to border.
In “Overlook,” for instance, big tentacles destroy bridges, rising sea water threatens cities, and large fires rage in institutional buildings. A dome encloses a metropolis, a rocket named Mars 2 heads for a brand new dwelling within the photo voltaic system, and an airplane banner advertises “Expertise Will Save Us” in a bleak but not unimaginable actuality fueled by techno-utopianism.
In his large-scale “Sufficient 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 influence on the surroundings.
Ready for the Future underscores the precariousness of complacency, a “cautionary story,” the gallery says, laying naked the fragility of our constructed surroundings.
The present continues by April 26 in New York Metropolis. Discover extra on the artist’s website.
