It could be a slogan for the times as Americans are fed up with crises on all sides. Wp get the full experience. Arrow Right Rarely has a message been so widespread and felt so weakly than at the museum. Cultural centers are so saturated with social messaging that other ideas fall away. The artist duo known as Ghost of a Dream have created works that feature bleached corals and burnt mountainsides. The Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington has a show by Ghost of a Dream that depicts a world on fire but is cool to the touch. Lauren Was and Adam Eckstrom are artists based in Wassaic, N.Y. The artists, who met at the Rhode Island School of Design, have worked together on elaborate projects that explore the id and impulses of America's working class. At the height of the financial crisis, the artists turned discarded lottery tickets into sculptures of luxury, such as the interior of a European period room, which was rendered in the manic colors of scratch-off cards. The series mined the dopamine and despair of low-stakes gambling to create vivid, mandala-like objects. Ghost's most recent work is "Thunder Drowns Out What the Lightning Sees", a mounted print featuring dozens of news images of a stripped cobalt mine. The blurry image suggests the dull, insensate entreaty of a measureless problem, captured nowhere in particular yet everywhere all at once. The title of the piece is "And If the Ground's Not Cold, Everything Is Gonna Burn, We'll All Take Turns, I'll Get Mine Too." This system for producing images links different disasters without saying much about them as a whole. The crisis at hand is fast fashion, and there is a hint that there is a problem related to the misprinted championship T-shirts that end up in landfills. The title refers to a song by Weezer, a band that sounds worse for wear since its 1990s heyday.
If the fast fashion crisis is the same as the ice cap crisis and the acidification crisis, does there anything to say about it? The answer involves capitalism and late-stage empire, but the prompt is so bloodless that it flattens the challenges of our time into a doomerism. There is no telling between "She Got Both Feet on the Ground, and She's Burnin' It Down" and "They Wrote It All Down as the Progress of Man" Both works feature green and ocher to suggest verdant landscape interrupted by devastation, but they land with all the resonance of a chart in a PDF. The room is bathed in golden sunlight when the projectors are suspended from the ceiling. Ghost credits all the dozens of artists who submitted videos, but it doesn't matter since the videos bleed together in a blur of lens flare, since they hail from all but seven of the 195 nations recognized by the United Nations. The piece is pleasant when the sun reflects on the floor, but it's only uplifting when it's straightforward. Ghost of a Dream has shown in previous projects that it is possible to make something with small mimetic gestures, like scratching off a stack of lottery cards. The artists fail to evoke any cataclysm for a landscape project built around catastrophe.
There is a place where they perform miracles.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington will be open through March 17.