Audio Guide
Someday, all this by David Opdyke
In this audio guide, artist David Opdyke describes Someday, all this. A transcript for each section is also available below.
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So now I'm going to describe a few areas in detail. In one card near the center, two sailboats tack hard into sharp wind gusts, their pilots looking at the horizon or we can see the distant smoke plumes of launching rockets, the sign in a nearby card clarifies that no one is under attack the Rockets are headed for Mars. Another card features a cruise ship the ship's name has been covered with a giant tarp that reads ark number 3, hundreds of tiny figures lean over the guard rails packed in tight, all wearing orange life vests just like the refugees to get picked up off the coast of Africa trying to get to Europe running away drought crop failures. A nearby card features a giant billboard, the only structure on a tiny Island that reads “send them back”. A cluster of cards near the bottom forms a harbor area. There's a massive sea wall with unfinished condo towers on one side and flood waters full of wrecked boats on the other. One Tower is named High Ground while another advertises dry one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms. A construction crane holds a banner “choose a side”, while the sea wall itself is aggressively tagged with doubtful graffiti images of money bags, skulls, and Mars will save us. Another cluster of cards forms of cityscape ringed by flames gigantic green caterpillars chew holes in apartment towers in skyscrapers. Nearby a huge glowing yellow moth flies low over a rail yard casting an enormous shadow. throughout the Central Ocean area, sea monsters and giant octopuses make occasional appearances, perhaps as a punishment for collective sins. Crows peck at the giant bungee cords tearing off clumps of brightly colored fibers and wherever there's a road or path or an open field there are people on the move dragging luggage and children along trying to escape to somewhere better.
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So I’ve been describing the overall structure, but not the methods that make it all work. After all, I'm asking you to believe that 400 individual postcards, each with its own unique subject matter, viewpoint, and details somehow mesh into a unified landscape. It’s true the human brain wants to make unity from fragments, to make order from chaos so the trick is to find groupings of postcards with some similarity of texture and color and with enough shapes or edges that seem to continue across the borders of the cards, just enough to create the illusion of continuity. I got almost all the postcards through eBay searching for cards from the early 1900s before color photographic printing became widely available. These early ones are printed from a black and white photographic negative and several hand-engraved color plates. The handmade illustration-like quality of the images is what allows me to paint into them with some believability. Ideally, I get the cards in large groups, not at all sure what I'm getting, this way the postcards are inexpensive so I can treat them as interchangeable raw material and more importantly, this way making mistakes is ok because the cards themselves are not precious. In parallel to this material Gathering process, I begin testing out combinations of cards in clusters, looking for that magical alignment of color and shape between adjacent cards, that fools the eye into seeing a unified Computing space. Those clusters get paired with other clusters and the process of trial-and-error continues with cards and their neighbors in every conceivable permutation. Eventually, I arrived at a solid grid of 400 or so post guards on my wall that read as a unified world. The next step is to break up that solid grid, the grid creates order supporting the illusion of a continuous space across the postcard so it's super important. But the world I'm describing is unstable and fractured so I put the whole thing into Photoshop and moved chunks of it around until I stumbled on the right balance, just enough structure to convey the unity of the whole and just enough disruption to indicate that it's all at risk of tearing itself apart. After I arrive at the final rearrangement of postcards I start thinking about my painted interventions, these start out as very casual cut paper sketches that I tagged and placed testing a fit and moving them around just like the cards in the previous phase. When an area seems ready I'll take down a group of cards and recreate the sketch images in paint. At various points in the process, there are hundreds of little scraps of paper stuck to the postcards, each one representing an idea held in limbo until I'm ready to make it real. This process is a 100% improvisation with ideas and decisions springing out of circumstances and happy accidents, but it's all at a glacial pace. More time is spent looking, thinking, and rearranging than in the painting process because every local decision affects the entire thing. Each intervention has a purpose within its immediate Neighborhood and it also has to work to support the overall composition.So I’ve been describing the overall structure, but not the methods that make it all work. After all, I'm asking you to believe that 400 individual postcards, each with its own unique subject matter, viewpoint, and details somehow mesh into a unified landscape. It’s true the human brain wants to make unity from fragments, to make order from chaos so the trick is to find groupings of postcards with some similarity of texture and color and with enough shapes or edges that seem to continue across the borders of the cards, just enough to create the illusion of continuity. I got almost all the postcards through eBay searching for cards from the early 1900s before color photographic printing became widely available. These early ones are printed from a black and white photographic negative and several hand-engraved color plates. The handmade illustration-like quality of the images is what allows me to paint into them with some believability. Ideally, I get the cards in large groups, not at all sure what I'm getting, this way the postcards are inexpensive so I can treat them as interchangeable raw material and more importantly, this way making mistakes is ok because the cards themselves are not precious. In parallel to this material Gathering process, I begin testing out combinations of cards in clusters, looking for that magical alignment of color and shape between adjacent cards, that fools the eye into seeing a unified Computing space. Those clusters get paired with other clusters and the process of trial-and-error continues with cards and their neighbors in every conceivable permutation. Eventually, I arrived at a solid grid of 400 or so post guards on my wall that read as a unified world. The next step is to break up that solid grid, the grid creates order supporting the illusion of a continuous space across the postcard so it's super important. But the world I'm describing is unstable and fractured so I put the whole thing into Photoshop and moved chunks of it around until I stumbled on the right balance, just enough structure to convey the unity of the whole and just enough disruption to indicate that it's all at risk of tearing itself apart. After I arrive at the final rearrangement of postcards I start thinking about my painted interventions, these start out as very casual cut paper sketches that I tagged and placed testing a fit and moving them around just like the cards in the previous phase. When an area seems ready I'll take down a group of cards and recreate the sketch images in paint. At various points in the process, there are hundreds of little scraps of paper stuck to the postcards, each one representing an idea held in limbo until I'm ready to make it real. This process is a 100% improvisation with ideas and decisions springing out of circumstances and happy accidents, but it's all at a glacial pace. More time is spent looking, thinking, and rearranging than in the painting process because every local decision affects the entire thing. Each intervention has a purpose within its immediate Neighborhood and it also has to work to support the overall composition.
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About the postcards themselves. As I've been working with these early 20th-century postcards I've thought a lot about nostalgia. That era from 1905 to 1942 seems to us like a more innocent time before we really started messing things up climate-wise. The way the cards are made reinforces that feeling, they look more like illustrations and photographs like Norman Rockwell's covers for the Saturday evening post. But, global warming didn't start just because we started paying attention to it is baked into the way we do things and the way we live all the way from the beginning. resource extraction, endless expansion, always convincing ourselves as Americans that there will always be more land, more open roads, and endless frontiers to move into. So what I'm really doing is taking our contemporary problems, attitudes, and arguments and recontextualizing them, bringing them back to the roots. In my opinion, we have been heading in the wrong direction for a very very long time.
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Someday, all this is an arrangement of 400 postcards set nearly edge-to-edge in a tight rectangular grid about 8 feet tall and 11 feet wide on the wall. As a totality, the postcards read as a divided landscape. The center stripe is a horizontal zone of water, all water, with a sprinkling of islands, bridges, cruise ships, and sailboats. The lower zone is a land mass with hills, valleys, industry, beaches, rivers, and cities. The top zone is also land with a similar variety of features but upside down so that in the end there are two shorelines, or perhaps two continents, facing each other across a large ocean. I should mention that the grid while rigidly applied is clearly in a messy process of breaking down. There are fractures everywhere with entire sections of postcards separating from their neighbors and pushing in a counterclockwise twist. This motion of spiraling and pulling apart is counteracted by brightly colored lines that connect the two land masses, tying them together across the water. On closer inspection the lines resolve into huge bungee cords painted into the cards, their ends hooked onto dams and bridges or tied around mountains. Some of them have snapped from the strain, while a few of them still hold on.
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One thing I want to emphasize is that a lot of what's going on in Someday, all this is funny, absurd, and even ridiculous. It's just no fun to keep yelling about how bad things are getting, to stand on a soapbox and lecture people, no one likes that and I need to keep going. So, even if it's just for my own mental health I have to make myself laugh in the studio. The humor creates an entry point. The work is charging straight at serious issues which can be off-putting, but because it doesn't take itself too seriously, at least I hope. Global warming is not a singular entity or a directly observable process. It is what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject”: a vast collection of events, data spread across time and space in a way that we can never really get a grip on. The way we experience global warming isn't like it's a thing that we can see. We see it in disruptions, in events that defy our expectations, like wow we got a lot less rain this summer than usual or that hurricane sure was a big surprise, or have you ever seen a winter this cold before? We witness these events and we feel like they mean something, but we just can't point a finger at the snow outside and say that it is global warming. I guess I decided it was my job to collapse that weirdness, to make the climate crisis visible in two ways: as an all-encompassing amorphis problem and also as an accumulation of all the little things we notice in our daily life, in our backyards. If you want to do something about the climate crisis you don't have to start at the top with a giant slippery hyperobject we call global warming. We can start with what you see, what you know, and the problems at hand and work on that.
