'Utopia': Christian Turner and Rich Auth

Utopia brings together the works on paper and sculpture of two artists working at Studio Route 29 who explore the cultural concept of Utopia from historical and speculative lenses, respectively.

Rich Auth’s fascination with technology and how it shapes, alters, powers, and extends human bodies and culture offers a picture of the myriad ways worlds are imagined and built. In his drawings of Hollywood history, car culture, The Bauhaus, medical innovation, and relics recontextualized by the journalist or museum curator, Auth spools out an interest in the comfort, autonomy, pleasure, and power which are the utopian promises of the Western cultural project. In this fantasy catalog of sorts, Auth positions these wonders in the miraculous light of the superhero, whose clarity of purpose shines towards the people's wellbeing, health, and happiness.

Christian Turner’s assemblage sculpture is an extended performative construction project bringing into dimensionality a mashed up world where characters from contemporary movies and cartoons play alongside fantastic imagined episodes of Turner’s life. In playful and irreverent relationship to material, Turner cobbles together an excitedly undelineated and speculative sculptural utopia that graciously and generously hosts his goofs and spoofs, his sudden turns of thought and delight. Anything and anyone can be anything here, and pathways of meaning split and meander unconcernedly across time, space, and horizon.