According to widespread internet speculation, we’re living in the “darkest timeline.” So much has changed radically in the past five years — from the social solidarity and racial justice movements of the early pandemic to the current backlash against both — that it seems like as good a theory as any. With “Future Casting,” her show at the Red Mill Gallery at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Nina Buxenbaum asks us to examine alternate paths.
“Topsy Turvy Transition,” the largest work in the show at 55 by 42 inches, is also its strongest and most developed. The mixed media drawing depicts a Black woman looking up at the viewer from underneath the voluminous skirts of a white Southern belle type. The pair exist within an architectural setting where the outlines of a pillar are filled with a landscape — the outside inside, leaving blank space where a vista should be.
The piece is part of a body of work Buxenbaum started almost 25 years ago, which uses a Topsy-Turvy doll as its central metaphor. The dolls, which originated during the era of American slavery, feature a white baby on one side and a Black one on the other; flipping the skirt reveals the other side.
Buxenbaum uses that imagery with realistically drawn adult figures to convey the complicated nature of her own biracial identity. The two figures seem both oblivious to and dependent on each other; everything in this world, including the landscape, is indeed topsy-turvy.
According to her artist statement, Buxenbaum has shifted her focus in recent years to the environment and our relationship to the land. “Possible Future Dyptic” 1 and 2 offer up two paths. A pastel-colored future in which hands plant seeds, a figure harvests dandelions and purple mountains merge with a reclining pregnant figure contrasts with an India ink vision of dead trees and a decomposing skeleton.
“Imagining the Food Forest” shows a bountiful urban farm taking root outside the buildings of CUNY York College, where Buxenbaum teaches. In “Plastic Landscape,” a figure recedes into a dark mountainscape, ghostly plastic bottles in the foreground signaling an ominous future. While the imagery certainly gets the artist’s point across, it’s missing the rich complexity that makes “Topsy Turvy Transition” so compelling.
Two paintings, “YAMECAH Food Forest ‘What is, and what could be'” 1 and 2, convey the conflict between different visions of the future on a more pragmatic level. According to the exhibition text, Buxenbaum made the paintings as part of advocacy for an on-campus agroforestry project that failed to come to fruition. Over lush gardens of flowering trees, she has sketched white contour lines to indicate the ugly construction site that now exists in the same space.
These are confusing but intriguing pictures that successfully convey uncertainty about which timeline we occupy and which future lies ahead. With recent reporting suggesting that CUNY is projecting increased enrollment even as the current presidential administration cuts education funding, we can only hope that whatever’s being built in the garden will include a new path.
This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2025.
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