| As any cynic will tell you, a utopia is not only a perfect world, but it is also a purely imaginary one. And looking to the word’s etymology, there’s some truth to this contention: “Utopia” comes from the Greek ou, “not” and topos, “place,” and so beneath the term’s idealism, there is an underlying pathos—the perfect world is ultimately a place that does not, and cannot, exist except in dreams. | 
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Broadway Gallery, January 5-15, 2009. Reviewed by Brandon Geist
IAs any cynic will tell you, a utopia is not only a perfect world, but it is also a purely imaginary one. And looking to the word’s etymology, there’s some truth to this contention: “Utopia” comes from the Greek ou, “not” and topos, “place,” and so beneath the term’s idealism, there is an underlying pathos—the perfect world is ultimately a place that does not, and cannot, exist except in dreams.
It’s an understanding that pervades “Lost Utopias,” the first solo show from Brooklyn-based photographer Jade Doskow, which recently closed after a 12-day stint at the Broadway Gallery. The nine pieces in the exhibition come from Doskow’s continuing “Future Passed” series, in which she has set about photographing World’s Fair sites as they stand today. Huge expos held each year in a different international city, World’s Fairs have been profoundly utopian events ever since the very first one, London’s “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations,” was held in 1851. This original World’s Fair featured an sumptuous main pavilion, aptly named The Crystal Palace, and displayed cutting-edge technology of the era, including a precursor of today’s fax machine and the “Tempest Prognosticator,” a barometer using leeches of all things. It set the tone for the Fairs to come; their very names speak to their idealism—New York’s 1964 “Peace Through Understanding” expo, and Spokane’s 1974 “Celebrating Tomorrow’s Fresh, Clean Environment,” for example. But the Fairs are also, by their nature, temporary events, and as Doskow’s work shows, what remains on the sites of these expos frequently belies their visions of tomorrow. In fact, some of the Fair grounds have literally gone to the toilet—as represented in her shot of the site of Philadelphia’s 1876 “Centennial Exposition,” where two of the four structures that remain from the event are brick toilet buildings, evocatively captured in Doskow’s photograph under a stark sky clawed by the limbs of the bare trees around. Others, while more intact, have fallen into neglect—in her image of the New York 1964 Fair grounds, we see the once-imposing New York State Pavilion now chipped, rusted, and overgrown with ivy, almost completely absorbed by its environment.
And yet, far from undercutting the idealism of these expos by spotlighting their impermanence, Doskow brings her own dreamlike romanticism to her subjects, filling them with a renewed, if very different, sense of magic and mystery. One photograph, a 15.5” x 19.5” digital C-print Chicago 1893 World’s Fair, “The Columbian Exposition,” Site of Agriculture & Manufacturing Liberal Arts Building, View II, seems to capture an alien landscape: a golden dune bursting into a crest of golden brush that practically flames and flickers against the deep, purple-blue sky behind. It’s hard to imagine that the fair pavilion that once stood there could have been any more inspiring. In another piece, a startling 20” x 25.75” print Brussels 1958 World’s Fair, “A New Humanism,” Atomium at Night, a sci-fi structure, all supersized silver spheres and cylindrical struts, rises glowing into the darkness; in its glass lobby stands a Christmas tree, seemingly beamed in from a simpler, long-gone time. Shooting with an old-fashioned large-format camera, then perfecting shots digitally, Doskow brings out the not-quite-real feeling in the scenes she’s capturing, setting ultra-crisp images beside ethereal smears of light and color, creating striking juxtapositions befitting subjects that have fallen out of sync with the times.
It’s a somewhat ironic fate for sites that were once celebrated for their visions of the future, but the divergent conditions of the Fair grounds today illustrate instead the chaotic unpredictability of history’s march. So Doskow’s work seems to propose that maybe a truly perfect world is one in which the future remains dreamlike and organic in its wide-ranging possibilities. Relatedly, there is a subtle environmental bent to the many of photographs: Doskow finds a particular majesty in sites and/or structures like Chicago’s 1983 Expo and the 1964 New York State Pavilion that have been consumed by nature, defying the prognostication, heavy on technology and human achievement, of the World Fairs themselves. All of which is not to say that there’s anything wrong with utopian fantasy. To the contrary, the ghostly, bittersweet beauty that Doskow finds in each site suggests that even when utopian dreams are deferred, as inevitably they are, there remains something wonderful in simply the act of dreaming.
