The Future Never Spoke

Mother-In-Law’s is proud to present a new installation based exhibition entitled, The Future Never Spoke, featuring: Thomas Broadbent, Beth Dary, Jessica Hargreaves, Kathleen Vance. Enmeshed in a multilayered installation fusing concepts from each individual’s artistic practice, “The Future Never Spoke” relays a disrupted narrative of nature and artifice merging and emerging in time. Examining concepts of habitat loss and encroachment, climate change and the role of humans within their natural environment, this installation blurs the line between the domestic and the wild. The scenario presented inundates a bedroom chamber with elements of nature, with a wall of flowing water partially filling the room, soil pulling in from the corners, and barnacles forming along the seams and edges of the room. Each artist presents a component which is layered upon with another artist’s works to create an immersive dialog. 

Jessica Hargreaves sets the tenor of the room with her blue and white toile pattern wallpaper, drapes and bed linens depicting an underwater scene featuring figures and components from her series, “Girls at the End of the World”. Kathleen Vance’s installation employs a wall of water that partially obscures the wallpaper in areas, as if the room were submerged or in the process of being overtaken by oceanic forces. Vance has sculpted large piles of soil that engulf portions of the furniture. Beth Dary’s installation of porcelain barnacles emerge from the walls and are emanating from Vance’s piles of soil, creating a feeling of temporal distortion in which the viewer is unsure whether they have come before, after, or during an environmental event. 

Thomas Broadbent presents watercolor depictions of possible post-human scenarios where animals have repurposed artifacts of humankind for their own needs and/or desires. In one of his large scale watercolor paintings, a blue heron rides a tortoise with a gold chain as a lead. Furthering this change in a perception of time, Jessica Hargreaves’s handculpted paintings reference a prophetic narrative of three female heroines facing zoomorphic monsters under the sea. The overall collaborative installation by Hargreaves, Vance, Broadbent and Dary presents a vision of domestic bliss being disrupted with the interjection of nature–pulling at the seams of the homestead. The exhibition presents the works together to be read at the viewer's discretion–as a warning, a hopeful look to the future, or a view of life after the anthropocene.

Jessica Hargreave’s “Girls At the End of the World” is a series featuring allegorical, aspirational visions of girlhood that turn news stories about disaster - political and environmental - into fantastical scenes of female empowerment. Inhabited by roving bands of girls who together subvert, rewrite, and feminize these stories, the resulting narratives are simultaneously dark and hopeful. These stories happen against a backdrop of drawn, painted and sculpted imagery that often merges art historical references to iconic works by artists such as Turner, Delacroix, Bruegel and Tiepolo. The girls shero-styled antics take on a hyperbolic quality as they face zoomorphic monsters.

Thomas Broadbent often selects endangered wildlife as the key figures in his compositions, often putting them in domestic settings, with human objects and furniture such as Eames Lounge Chairs. Broadbent studies the anatomy of the animals in a very concentrated and focused manner, creating a hyper-realistic portrayal, with intense detail of fur, feathers and skin. The native habitat of the animals depicted has been altered to consist of cast off and reclaimed elements of human domestically. Foraging through their new environment, the animals gather together, collecting and searching for resources they can use. Broadbent personifies the creatures, presenting the question as to whether the animals are left with the remains of trappings of man or if they have altered their environment themselves.

In Beth Dary’s artworks, she examines the concept of water as a force to shape the land, sustain life, or erode and destroy. Dary’s artworks also respond to our connectivity and the effect of human activity on land and water. Her installation series, Emersion, began with a personal fascination with barnacles that grow in abundance on Cape Cod, where she was born. Dary felt that this kind of sea life worked as a metaphor for the resilient and adaptable qualities of humans in a time of global warming and rising tides. Made of porcelain, each sculpture is hand carved porcelain replicating the forms found in these naturally occurring crustaceans. Dary utilizes natural dyes and materials such as tea and iron oxide to stain the raw porcelain pieces to give a feeling of the aging process that allows them to appear as though they are naturally integrated into their surroundings.

Kathleen Vance is an environmental artist that creates projects that connect people to local aspects of nature that are overlooked or under appreciated. “In my work I distinguish forms that are indicative of growth and explore the variance between experiences of an authentic natural encounter vs. an inauthentic encounter. I look for the ways in which nature can be brought back into the course of one’s daily life. I am intrigued by areas where manicured nature is being reclaimed by the wild. With my installations I engage viewers with the experience of a space being overtaken by natural elements.”

For press inquires please contact Kathleen Vance, k@frontroom.org. www.frontroomles.com • 718.782.2556