Judy Natal’s Future Perfect entails a photographic sweep of three peculiarly evocative sites where human intervention and land use are exploring the quality and state of futurity. A Las Vegas desert Preserve that provides a vision for a sustainable future, Biosphere 2's exploration of controlled ecosystems and space colonization in Oracle, Arizona, and Iceland's geothermal landscapes are worlds apart from each other, but become perfect foils to imagine what the landscapes of the future might look like. The photographs establish unexpected but compelling resonances between these disparate landscapes, to distill and display our hopes, perceptions and misunderstandings of nature, and suggest both the potential and pitfalls of our future on earth.
Natal portrays these sites as indications of our future, illuminating the present moment and the choices we have yet to make. At once a cautionary tale and Utopian dream, Future Perfect invites and provokes opportunities for reflection and analysis, and poetically moving from clear, precise imaging to layers of steam, ambiguity and possibility while examining the global interconnectedness of such strong, yet ultimately fragile and threatened landscapes.
