Launch LA is proud to present The Edge of Today, a group exhibition featuring Todd Baxter, Brian Cooper, Daniel Dove, and Siobhan McClure.

The future is a place open to possibilities. Rooted in the promise of science and technology, it is also tinged by the weight of today’s dreams and nightmares. Building with the bones of the present and the near past, the artists in this show (Baxter, Cooper, Dove & McClure) create work that contemplates the future. They share an appreciation of sci-fi films, TV shows, & books yet they do not illustrate someone else’s future but rather create idiosyncratic alternates.

Reminiscent of Watteau’s melancholic reveries of the fête galante, The Edge of Today artists convey a sense that the party is over, but wasn’t it grand. In the case of Baxter and Dove, the recent past of the 1960’s and 1970’s is what is lamented. For them the future is set within the ruins of those optimistic times. Their work glories in the clean lines of modern architecture and space age fashion while noting that the sheen of perfection has been eroded and grown rusty with time. Still there is beauty and perhaps hope in their decayed tableaux.

This is also true in McClure’s world awash in the toxic debris of man’s rampant consumerism. Here nature reclaims and transforms what has been marred, leaving the children to salvage and create anew. For the future, after-all, comes down to children and dreams. And dreams are where Cooper’s art pulls us to a galaxy far away and very close, the human mind. Here the future whirls between hope and fear with each given space to spin a tale.

Contemporary issues have always been at the heart of work that grapples with the future. Possibilities are what these artists present. Whether the edge of today will bring us into a dark or shining tomorrow remains to be seen. Either way, beauty will be along for the ride.