“Superseed,” Hannah Antalek’s debut NYC solo exhibition at 5-50 gallery in Long Island City, draws on our species’ overall apathy about the environment. A surreal, dream-like sensibility informs a bio-luminescent vision of nature, cumulatively derived from dioramas she constructs from recyclable materials. She pulls us into a magical but also disconcerting world. Seminal Landing, the largest work, projects a haze of cobalt blue and violet that feels both subterranean and post-apocalyptic. Antalek’s signature “daisy dupe” swollen flowers are clustered together – glowing pearl yellows, tinged with pastel pink, in lilac shadows – as they reach towards twisting branches, dripping goo, and unexplained crystalline forms nestled around them.
Final Form, stretching five feet high, might be the notional personification of a daisy dupe, portrayed as if it were a starlet. The soft, fluorescent halo recalls color-retouched photos of the 1930s, while the digital prismatic hues are fiercely contemporary. Neon pinks dance amid deep manganese violet around mysterious diamond-like forms that appeared in Seminal Landing. In both paintings, these allude to the rather desperate idea of geo-engineering the earth’s atmosphere by blasting massive amounts of diamond dust into the sky to deflect the hot, beating sun.
Carbon Capture is more direct. It tracks as a stark warning about life on Earth after decisive climate change. The mutedly glowing sun familiar from recent wildfire summers melts the world in place, as Sahara brown spiked tendrils and cadmium orange-tinted flora swirl.
Perpetual Aura draws us into an intimate terrarium space as a solar eclipse presides distantly over a mound of sizzling neon red and lime-green daisy dupes reflecting light under a shroud of sulking branches. Antalek woos us with fantastical beauty and sobers us with haunting prospects. Because each painting is aggressively enveloping, we are bound to confront the implications of our action and inaction. We look at our planet, then at ourselves.
