Martha Ponting, Pat Acton, Wilma Millette, Jeff Hartbower and Daniel Needham are up-cycling the past to create a future that never existed with Steampunk’d - the current exhibit at Artful : The Gallery.
Steampunk’s origins lie in a nostalgic form of science fiction that takes Victorian-era aesthetics and imagines a future reliant on steam power rather than electricity. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are credited with the origins of the steampunk ethos. More recent iterations attesting to its staying power include Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events or Will Smith’s Wild Wild West.
All those Victorian elements are fertile ground for imagination, creative artistry, and cosplay complete with gears, goggles, vests, corsets, and lots of pipes and fittings for utilizing all that steam. Steampunk’d includes a wide array of sculpture, assemblage, and collage - all artistic methods which elegantly lend themselves to inventive steampunk creation.
Oscar Wilde suggests “the one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.” As steampunk has hit a new wave, re-makers continue recreating accoutrements from the past into a wide variety of art and gadgets (functional or not) through the ‘antiquifying’ of our disposable materials of mass production. Modern depersonalizing consumer technology is a favourite target and steampunk fans consider it a form of technological disruption and social protest to envision this parallel existence.
Steampunk continues alongside its latest iteration, dystopian cyberpunk. Our technological future has once again reached into the past, creating yet another parallel universe for us to wonder at, and rendering the first wave of a steampunk future now officially nostalgic.
Steampunk’d runs at Artful : The Gallery until Feb. 18. The gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday, noon-5 p.m.
Follow Artful : The Gallery on Instagram at @artfulthegallery or visit www.artfulthegallery.com.
