ODYSSEY PANORAMA: COLLABORATIVE POST APOCALYPTIC UTOPIANISM
Tyler Brett (T&T), Bridge (sundown), 2009, inkjet, 93x36 in.
Over the span of ten years, I collaborated with Canadian artist Tony Romano as T&T to produce multiple series of architectural models, drawings, sculptures, orthographic panoramic projections and music related to the portrayal of a futuristic humanity in the process of inventing various modes of habitation and recreation. Although playful and improbably optimistic in appearance, our peculiar carnivalesque enclaves set against blue skies allude to a post apocalyptic fantasy, where smallholders salvage and revise the tools of early 21st Century technology. Infrastructure has been repurposed and reduced in scale in the form of colourfully decorated complex stationary machinery & farcical energy making contraptions. In these projections, and the corresponding work I produced for this MFA thesis exhibition, the themes suggest a forecast that our current foundational human built systems will undergo monumental imaginative adaptations; signaling an impending shift toward an unchartered civilization where speculative engineering will provide the framework for the creation of a functional utopian refuge.
Tyler Brett (T&T), Freight train: cultivator, irrigator, bird traps, and vanguards, 2009, inkjet, 180x18 in.
Tyler Brett (T&T), Freight train: turbines, crops, harvester and forager, 2009, inkjet, 180x18 in.
Tyler Brett (T&T), Hunter, 2009, inkjet, 180x18 in.
Tyler Brett (T&T), Caboose, 2009, inkjet, 180x18 in.
Tyler Brett (T&T), Odyssey Panorama, 2009, exhibition catalogue booklet detail.
Tyler Bett (T&T), The Odyssey Panorama, 2009. MFA thesis exhibition, Snelgrove Gallery, University of Saskatchewan (exhibition catalogue booklet excerpts including examples of the work of T&T).