Dreaming of glory past and ringing endorsements of future perfection have long been celebrated as truths accepted as challenges, especially when navigating the hyperconnected capitalist end times we currently inhabit. In their collaborative exhibition, duality duality duality, Maria Wallace and Tim Slim explore fantastical melancholic worlds that at once exist and were figments of imaginative players. Through the use of images, objects and found materials presented as tableaus of whichever reality suits best, the two artists combine to present a capsule of time, honor and perhaps even dignity to fragments of supposed memories.

Aware that it’s one of the most challenging things to spot glimpses of beauty and maybe the most challenging thing to let beauty happen, Maria Wallace still keeps pushing on seeking the never-ending highways of her inner history on an endless road trip while listening to Americana for a new mirage of the American Dream appearing on the horizon in the dusk of her own imagination.

Switching from Emmy Lou Harris to Madonna she is chasing uncatchable dreams of fame and success heading west to find her California before it’ll disappear in fire and earthquakes, like one of her inflatable palm trees imploding after thousands of hours of work, and hundreds of moments of failure on the floor of her studio holding onto the illusion that Pop Art still continues. She is on her road trip enjoying the panavision landscapes and crystals of capital skylines while native America and Europe are in the backseat annoying her with history and guilt before asking her to stop at the Drive-In for some cheeseburgers, fries and a coke.

Tim Slim’s works makes you feel like you have just jumped into a dumpster and are laying around amongst the trash and residual oils, except seen through acid eyes—everything fractured and glittering—it looks so beautiful, or you are actually what is beautiful and those object remnants are just reflecting you back onto yourself a million times over in a mutated repetition pattern that is in one glimpse both soothing and disturbing, simultaneously.

Remember when we took that dead pigeon and put it in an old McDonald’s take-out bag and carried it around all night, ‘cause we couldn’t find a suitable burial site? And then remember dousing it in holy water, which was really just luke-warm beer, and throwing the whole package onto the Bauhaus roof? All those things that were desecrations seemed like blessings…