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'Utopias are often only premature truths.' - Alphonse de Lamartine 'Art is a Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.' - Zadie Smith, On Beauty 'There is also the European dream of America... an adventure in real estate.' - James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work Depictions of paradises, terrestrial and extra-, have been a fixture of human art-making for thousands of years. While early matriarchal, then patriarchal, tribes saw the infinite world around them as an Earthly paradise wherein all outer realms were contained, increasingly expansionist pan- and -mono-theistic practices began to imagine a place of gods, demons, heroes, and dead in extra-planetary Elsewheres beyond Earthen boundaries. In short, where depictions of Nature—for early more regional pagan faiths—were mystery and paradise enough, depictions from more conquesting post-indigenous fraternities were pinpointed uniquely outside the planet they called Home. Colonial appetites, of course, are the root cause of this. A geographical finitude was the end result of exploring, dominating, delineating state borders, and commanding commonwealths throughout a planet that, before European galleons sought their lebensraum, could have otherwise seemed like an eternal expanse. Only in the cartography of settler colonies, starting most expansively with Ancient Rome, did empires begin to understand the world itself as finite, their planetary attributes increasingly demoted of all magic, prized as they were becoming only for personal use and gain; Nature possessing less and less transcendence amidst violent plunder. And as Rome’s post-antiquity brand became ‘Holy,’ the despotic Higher Power the European conglomerate that wielded it created, next unsubtly began to emulate their own monarch’s; a deity wholly removed from Nature where former gods at least held reign over weather attributes and the harvest, to say nothing of gods who reigned over more ambiguous meteorology like drinking shit tons of wine and having varieties of sex (see Roman Gods: Prema, Inuus, Pertunda). For SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2025, the exhibition that doesn’t quit, seeks works which articulate just these boundaries through the theme of PARADISE LOST + FOUND —temporal and spiritual; just these utopias—real or imagined; just these lost or found parts of our lives—youth, love, memory, intellect, statehood, success. All the dials on the Rotas Fortunae, achieved or dis-allocated with one blindfolded spin of the wheel. What work deals with the conflagration of continental identities that defy the notion of statehood? Of nationality? Of race? All and more in-roads to the theme are welcome for the 2025 Los Angeles and New York exhibitions. As planetary hell-scapes, wholly irrespective of party or faith, appear to issue forth from the spigot of our Empire unchecked, and Nature at last retaliates against the corporate domination over Her spoils with multitudinous equivalents—in floods and storms and fires—of ‘don’t’, what cope do artists persist in to keep their own worlds sacred? Are they truly untainted, untouched? Is it a Great Beyond here in front of us, somehow able to be reached-out-to and touched in the world? Or is it not-so-greatly beyond us, our only hope in the Art World of our fabricating just to escape into our abstractions and representations; themselves a safehaven were there no other in Heaven or Earth to be found?