ODYSSEY PANORAMA: COLLABORATIVE POST APOCALYPTIC UTOPIANISM 


Tyler Brett, Bridge (sundown), 2009, inkjet, 93x36 in.

Over the span of ten years, I collaborated with Tony Romano as T&T to produce multiple series of scale models, drawings, sculptures and orthographic panoramic projections depicting futuristic agrarian collectives in the process of constructing and living in various states of habitation and recreation.  Although imbued with playfulness and implied optimism, our carnivalesque settlements set against blue skies also resemble a dystopian fiction, where post apocalyptic survivors salvage and revise the broken remnants of an unsustainable society.  In our projections, and the related work I produced for this exhibition, current transportation technologies are deconstructed and reduced in scale in the form of stationary, magical energy contraptions. The work is suggestive of a forecast that present day systems and infrastructure will undergo a transmutation into improvised, inhabitable sculpture and architectural art; signaling an impending green shift toward the speculative engineering necessary for building a utopian refuge.

The Odyssey Panorama, installation view
The Odyssey Panorama, installation view

Tyler Brett, Freight train: cultivator, irrigator, bird traps, and vanguards, 2009, inkjet, 180x18 in. 

Tyler Brett, Freight train: turbines, crops, harvester and forager, 2009, inkjet, 180x18 in. 

Tyler Brett, Hunter, 2009, inkjet, 180x18 in. 

Tyler Brett, Caboose, 2009, inkjet, 180x18 in. 

Tyler Brett, Odyssey Panorama, 2009, exhibition catalogue booklet detail.

Tyler Bett, The Odyssey Panorama, 2009. MFA thesis exhibition, Snelgrove Gallery, University of Saskatchewan (exhibition catalogue booklet excerpts including examples of the work of T&T).