Post Millennial Fizzy (Addressing the Possibility of the Future)

The Beaver College Art Gallery is pleased to present “Post Millennial Fizzy (Addressing the Possibility of the Future),” a group exhibition considering utopia, dystopia, and 21st-century culture. Co-curated by painter Adam Ross and Julie Joyce, director of the Luckman Fine Arts Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles, the exhibition features multimedia works by eleven Los Angeles-based artists, most of whom are presenting their work on the east coast for the first time. The exhibition opens November 3, 1999 with a reception for the artists starting at 7:30 PM preceded by a slide lecture by exhibition curators Ross and Joyce starting at 6:30 PM in Stiteler Auditorium, Murphy Hall, adjacent to the Art Gallery. “Post Millennial Fizzy” remains on view through December 19, 1999.

The exhibition takes its name from a fictional soft drink consumed in a novel about post-Y2K America by acclaimed author David Foster Wallace entitled Infinite Jest (1995). In his 1073-page epic, Wallace describes an entertainment-obsessed society addicted to a movie so engaging that anyone who watches it loses all desire to do anything else. Focusing on concepts related to the future, rather than a futuristic aesthetic per se, the works in the exhibition become platforms for speculation whose ends are as resourceful, critical, inspiring, or as preposterous as those found in Wallace’s novel. While many of the artists included employ some form of technology, just as many eschew it for materials that are pointedly handmade. Whether cynical or utopian in their projections, most of the artists emulate advanced ideas regarding marketing, design and lifestyle.

“Post Millennial Fizzy” was first presented at the Luckman Fine Arts Gallery, Los Angeles, a city – due in part to the industries and attitudes that rise from it – is often associated with the manufacture of the future. The show’s presentation in Glenside is funded by grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Friends and Advisory Board of the Beaver College Art Gallery.