Russell Nachman paints a lucid dream. Where have all the hippies gone? —They have abandoned their utopias.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Growing up in the 1970s I witnessed the decay of 1960's idealism. Thoughts of social change, alternative beliefs and cultural experiments were quickly giving way to feelings of lost desperation. My child's eye caught the colors of the music, mystic pilgrimages, gurus, and revolutionaries, of pyramid power and alternative consciousness in a great kaleidoscope, yet the adult despair, whose darkening lens I couldn't comprehend, distorted the colors. My desire to be present, to live in the colors and dreams of my parents and their friends, bound, as only a child's mind can do, their visions of a better world with their damage. The world I saw was a baroque, childlike vision of dystopia that I constructed as utopia - as if loss and disappointment were somehow integral parts of happiness.

My work is a meditation combining personal and cultural history on utopian dreams in two parts: landscape and meta-narrative. The landscapes are environments of mental habitation (visually inspired, in part, by progressive rock album art of the 1970s) filled with icons and talismans that have specific function/relevance, but are inert - lost. The meta-narrative combines the histories, ghosts and gods that have engendered and perhaps abandoned these environments. My images range from the obvious to the eccentric, the social to the personal to purposely create an individual character.

An essential component of any utopia is that of Lack. This point de capiton is the drive that pre-figures a need for the idyllic. We have been expelled from the garden and wish to re-enter. This wishing to re-enter is the wish of becoming in our lack. But paradise is being not becoming. The simple fact is we want to construct a new paradise with all the things we have acquired from our tasting of the forbidden fruit. The forbidden fruit is awareness of self and awareness of self is the point de capiton ; it is Lack - the knowledge that there is something in which we are but cannot know. In life we embrace all that we are/are-not in awareness of self. It's a love affair with imperfection and in dreaming utopia we wish to bind ourselves with our imperfection in paradise. By placing paradise in the future -- just around the bend -- we intentionally hold on to Lack. In this utopia of the future is it not true that it's desirous to have knowledge of self and history to cherish under perfect skies? To return to paradise with all our wounds and loneliness present yet no longer potent?