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MAGNAN METZ - David Opdyke

199 views · Published 26 April 2014 · 6:31 · Indexed 30 October 2026

Channel: NYC GALLERY OPENINGS · 2014 · Entertainment

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David Opdyke
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be

Magnan Metz Gallery
521 W 26th Street
New York, NY 10001 

April 25th - May 31st, 2014
Opening:  April 24th 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM


Magnan Metz Gallery is pleased to present its premiering exhibition for David 
Opdyke.  The Future Ain't What It Used to Be continues Opdyke's exploration of 
globalization, consumerism, and civilization's waste.  The exhibition will be on view 
from April 25 -- May 31, 2014 with an artist reception on April 24th, 6-8pm. 

In 1977, Opdyke was a third grader growing up in post-industrial Schenectady, New 
York when Voyager 1 was launched. Its contents included a gold record with a 
message from President Carter, an 8-Track Player, and an unprecedented amount of 
computer processing power. For Americans everywhere the prospect of 
communicating with distant worlds, owning flying cars and robot maids, and the 
inexorable promise of a better future seemed less like fiction and more like reality. 

In August 2012, NASA's Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to reach 
interstellar space, accomplishing the farthest reaches of the original mission. 

The Future Ain't What It Used to Be is Opdyke's visual recitation of the 37 years that 
have passed since the Voyager launch.  Imploring us to ask: Weren't we supposed to 
be living like the Jetsons by now? Has the anticlimactic down pour of i-Phones and 
140 characters made mankind more advanced? According to Opdyke, it depends on 
who you ask, and through his work he begins to unravel a once promised future.

Upon entering the gallery, viewers encounter a fallen 25-foot wooden utility pole 
with preternatural growths and spindles so defiantly resistant they have begun to 
reclaim it.  The Great Wave, an ominous 18 foot Tsunami ink drawing on rice paper, 
floats on the nearby wall.  Closer inspection reveals waves composed of hundreds of 
firearms, the overwhelming number of weapons perhaps alluding to society's great 
issue with gun control.

On the other side of the wall is Homestead, an eye level sculpture of an abandoned 
and unfinished luxury high-rise that portends mankind's continued quest to build, 
but also an ad-hoc shelter presumably for the marginalized. Monument to 3:19 am is 
an arrangement of street lamps and yield signs now immersed within nature, 
growing like wildflowers. The exhibition also includes works on paper with Opdyke's 
archetypal arrangements of our ever adapting world such as Cross Connectivity 
Study in which accumulated piles of discarded cables and devices have become 
nesting materials for scavenging birds.

The Future Ain't What It Used To Be places viewers into Opdyke's iconic scenarios 
that channel complex forces and ideas, leaving us precariously perched on the 
tipping point between coherence and chaos. The result is a realization that the total 
control the future promised may never come to fruition, but perhaps, that's not so 
bad after all.


Music by:
Chill Carrier - A New Day

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