Visitors from Shallow Space

Adam Dalva, Howard Fonda, Paul Gagner, Annie Hémond Hotte,

Ryan Johnson, Sophie Larrimore

Curated by Annie Hémond Hotte and Nora Nieves

Fresh Window Gallery’s current group show takes its inspiration from the pages of Omni – the cult science magazine published from 1978 – 1998. Oriented around factual and fictional ideas of the future, Omni entranced its readers with lavish space art; in-depth interviews with the era’s leading scientists; and tales of parapsychology and fantasy, all combined with some of the twentieth century’s most crucial science fiction stories from such greats as William Gibson and Arthur C Clarke.

Visitors From Shallow Space takes its curatorial cue from Omni’s candy-coated visions of past potential futures; its presentations of ‘real world’ science as filled with wild possibility, rather than just drably informative: featured article titles from the March 1982 edition, for instance, included Sperm From Deep Space, How to Design Your Own Dreams, Laser Facelifts, Animal Teleportation and The Secrets of A Long Life – all advertised on an exuberant illustrated cover depicting an intergalactic view from the surface of a rocky planet.

The works in the show place a similarly idiosyncratic, often sharply humorous mirror to our current reality. Paul Gagner’s paintings use his characteristically wry sensibility and bold visual language to comment on some of the more absurd aspects of contemporary life. In Three Full Moons (2018), for example, Gagner takes aim at the tendency to filter so much of our lived experience through a smartphone’s deadening lens. Sophie Larrimore’s canvases use a combination of dog and human motifs as springboards for her explorations of texture, color and form. Her definitively democratic renditions of animal and human subjects hint at ideas around speciesism, complicating what we think it means to exist as dog or person.

- Helena Haimes