'Utopias are often only premature truths.'

- Alphonse de Lamartine

'Art is a Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.'

- Zadie Smith, On Beauty

'There is also the European dream of America... an adventure in real estate.'

                                                                               - James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

Depictions of paradises, terrestrial and extra-, have been a fixture of human art-making for thousands of years. While early matriarchal, then patriarchal, tribes saw the infinite world around them as an Earthly paradise wherein all outer realms were contained, increasingly expansionist pan- and -mono-theistic practices began to imagine a place of gods, demons, heroes, and dead in extra-planetary Elsewheres beyond Earthen boundaries.

In short, where depictions of Nature—for early more regional pagan faiths—were mystery and paradise enough, depictions from more conquesting post-indigenous fraternities were pinpointed uniquely outside the planet they called Home.

'Wishing Well' detail, painting by Zoe McGuire, 2022

Colonial appetites, of course, are the root cause of this. A geographical finitude was the end result of exploring, dominating, delineating state borders, and commanding commonwealths throughout a planet that, before European galleons sought their lebensraum, could have otherwise seemed like an eternal expanse. Only in the cartography of settler colonies, starting most expansively with Ancient Rome, did empires begin to understand the world itself as finite, their planetary attributes increasingly demoted of all magic, prized as they were becoming only for personal use and gain; Nature possessing less and less transcendence amidst violent plunder. And as Rome’s post-antiquity brand became ‘Holy,’ the despotic Higher Power the European conglomerate that wielded it created, next unsubtly began to emulate their own monarch’s; a deity wholly removed from Nature where former gods at least held reign over weather attributes and the harvest, to say nothing of gods who reigned over more ambiguous meteorology like drinking shit tons of wine and having varieties of sex (see Roman Gods: Prema, Inuus, Pertunda).

The abduction of Persephone, Greek. Royal Tomb, Vergina, 4th century BC

These Empires, thus—too sick on the blood harvest necessary to enrich their suzerains—thereafter suffered from a kind of (Groucho) Marxist ennui: they did not appear to want to be part of the biggest club that would have them as a member; as regarded the natural world around them anyway. Seemed exponentially to lose the taste for mythologizing even the physical world around them the more they commodified it, purporting to be of a different Creator outside Mother Earth and Father Sky entirely. Estranged from their rightful parents (or, at least, I guess you could say guardians…) imperial peoples fixed on their imaginary Heavens and Hades then, subordinating their commonwealths to the rules of these non-tangible realms as ruthlessly as if they were laws of nature, remanding them also to this place of No Place in the beyond that they held dear, disavowing them of their spiritual tether to the land and its miracle seasons.

From 'The Garden of Earthly Delights,' by Hieronymous Bosch, 1515

And so, by the time of Imperial Christianity especially, cut themselves off completely from the mytho-poeticizing of the planet as they had with worshiping it so many hundreds of years before, understandably seeking to dream outside the wastelands they themselves were leaving; forging, to compensate, Elsewheres outside the realm of possibility that reinforced their temporal might, even when ‘Here Be Dragons,’ as imaginary realms went, worked well enough for the autochthonic tribes they were conquering and reforming there and then.

In this psychological transfer—mirrored in the art-making that captured it—earthly paradises were lost; abstracted paradises found; all while colonizing forces, believing themselves masters of the universe (literally, in some cases; ‘catholic’), have, for thousands of years now, and comprised of many races and faiths, forged a Hell on Earth to replace the Nature-worshipping in humankind…

'Leaf Season,' by Kate Klingbeil, 2020For SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2025, the exhibition that doesn’t quit seeks works which articulate just these boundaries—temporal and spiritual; just these utopias—real or imagined; just these lost or found parts of our lives—youth, love, memory, intellect, statehood, success. All the dials on the Rotas Fortunae, achieved or dis-allocated with one blindfolded spin of the wheel.

As for our lionized imagery places: we’re talking about Camelots, Cockaignes, artist collectives and arcadias, yes, but also Gammorahs and Gaols and gulags and graves—the latter extreme appearing to always necessitate the former, like some cosmic ‘maat;’ a balance of celestial fantasy to overcompensate for an oblivion always man-made, whether being true subjugation-antidote or consent-manufacturing overcompensation.

What work deals with the conflagration of continental identities that defy the notion of statehood? Of nationality? Of race?

'Another Green World,' by Nicole Eisenman, 2015

What work suggests the ‘no place’ (‘utopia’) of a political safehaven; a life ideal or idealized, with a hope of getting to that place sooner?

Or is that place just Nature, and we’re already in it? Or Nurture, and we already have it here in our arms, bobbing up and down at the dinner table, playing with its food?

For many, The Great Beyond Them is a state of everlasting Beauty and Youth, this 'philosopher's stone' of eternal life, once conflated as a location by Ponce de Leone called 'Bimini' (now: 'Bahamas'), has its modern applications in the feminine make-up ritual, celebrity health & wellness movements, and West tech-bro IV ritual. A 'Grail' that suggests also Arthur and the idyll of Camelot, its own patriarchial Eden disrupted by the Guineverian beauty of the Feminine Divine; itself a legend that fostered British Imperialism, Spanish romances (and their antidotes like 'Don Quixote') and even the American knights errant in the 20th Century noir P.I. As well as more feminine counterparts in 'The Legend of Dorian Gray' and 'Safe' and 'The Substance' and 'The 7th Victim.'

'The Substance' (dir. Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

Like the clumsy rigidity of the Hollywood-copy ‘30s Nazi rom-com (…a real thing), paradises aren’t always ideal; sometimes, are ugly simulacra of repression, supremacy, and rage masquerading as a knee-slap matinee; smeared sickly frosting plastered over a killing field to try and paint a sweet excuse for all the flies.  

What work trafficks in mirroring this maudlin grotesquery so we see it clearer? Which Verhoevens, in this case, inhabit the horrid fascist-Hollywoodness, Heavens with the layout of Hells, landscaped to seem lost so we can see the oblivion in their counterparts closer up?

'Starship Troopers' (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1997)

For another aesthetic avenue: Whole aesthetic eras, their own ‘bosom of Abraham,’ hold, for the art-curious, their own point and counterpoint of zenith and nadir, Zion and No-Man’s-Land, as artists cling to their particular art-movement identities; abstraction and figuration, for example, still currently having it out in the heavyweight title match in our contemporary art world. Similarly, are there dueling disciplines under the theme that can, for another in-road, also be weighed here? Bicameral practices studied?—themselves representing numerous rungs of found and refused? And are there multi-eras of artwork, in a single artist’s oeuvre-to-date, also that can co-exist un-harmoniously; the antagonisms of an artist’s oscillating practice showcased, found in lost, lost in found, throughout their lifetime—there to date in a single show? Showing their Elsewheres in the mind of many eras?    

Childhood is a paradise lost; the losing of it perfectly conjured by Nick Ray in Robert Mitchum’s plundering of old toys from under the sub-floor in ‘The Lusty Men;’ family a paradise re-found for Odysseus at last coming home to his ‘no man’ life (his Polyphemetic nickname ‘Outis’ : 'no man'); our Greek Ulysses an avenging Rip Van Winkle/George Bailey in the bloody-redemptive climax of ‘The Odyssey.’

 'The Lusty Men' (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1952)

As with the school-hood box—detritus-collector of misplaced items presumed precious enough for someone to return to claim them—‘Lost & Found’ might suggest appropriation for this aesthetic Eden. Collage, then? Readymades? Casting concepts under a false flag in some meta-textual prayer to dusty old post-modernism?

In the realm of portraying the transcendent, Zoe McGuire makes emotive bio-spiritual meditations, heir apparent to Hilma af Klint-meets-Georgia O'Keefe, that gesture to planetary hereafters or maybe herebefores, adjoining micro and macro; all while Asif Hoque creates brown-skinned putis and gods in cartoonishly holy firmaments wrassled and re-appropriated from the idealized realms of both Roman Catholics and Ancient Greeks. For lost paradises look no further than the Boschian excesses of self by Kay Seohyung Lee, the consolidation of recalled sexual encounters by early Tracy Emin, the remitted embarrassments of race and intimacy by Brittany Tucker, or in the recasting of lost possibilities in the collages of Jim Jarmusch, in his collage-process constructing, for the pictographically renown, exploring life roads in this world untaken by them. As regards boundaries and borderlands, we often consider the work of Katya Grokhovsky, Saman and Sasan Oskouei, James Oster, Pajtim Osmanaj, Elektra KB. In further realms of appropriation, filmmaker Tom DiCillo makes surreal sculptures of amalgamated found objects; Gretchen Scherer appropriating famous halls of art and architecture for her own multi-perspective adaptations in oil paint. In the land of the dead, Anne Nowak’s floral transfers appropriate and recast left flowers robbed from their graves; in lands of his own making, Steve Paddack inhabits various limbos in his series on 'private islands;' and occupying the vernacular of advertizing, are the en plein air-captured paintings of a romanticism of the West by Eric Diehl.

'Stalker,' by Eric Diehl, 2024

'PARADISE  LOST + FOUND' 2025 will thus consider EMPYREANS and their opposites and revisionisms, RELIGIONS and their fictions, meditations on BOUNDARIES and BORDERLANDS, NEO-CLASSICISM and the retro-fitting of all past movements born into the now, and all things META-TEXTUAL, particularly those steeping themselves in a 'wolves clothes' style in order to get a better look at 'what big teeth we have.' Also in the silver lining if you find it: Escapism, Activism, Material Appropriation, Advertizing, Propaganda, Neo-Schmaltz, Camp, Dirges and Bucolics, Drugs and Dreamscapes, Sci-Fi and My-Fi et al. 

All and more in-roads to the theme are welcome for the 2025 Los Angeles and New York exhibitions. As planetary hell-scapes, wholly irrespective of party or faith, appear to issue forth from the spigot of our Empire unchecked, and Nature at last retaliates against the corporate domination over Her spoils with multitudinous equivalents—in floods and storms and fires—of ‘don’t’, what cope do artists persist in to keep their own worlds sacred? Are they truly untainted, untouched? Is it a Great Beyond here in front of us, somehow able to be reached-out-to and touched in the world? Or is it not-so-greatly beyond us, our only hope in the Art World of our fabricating just to escape into our abstractions and representations; themselves a safehaven were there no other in Heaven or Earth to be found?