Shown at Auckland’s Starkwhite, Mural #1 by Los Angeles artist Andy Alexander depicts a paneled library inflected with sci-fi Victoriana. The mural is a vast digital print, crisply cartoonish, but with a grimy palette. The library is alive with detail—woody scrolls and mouldings, wallpaper with sober candystripes, ominous chandeliers. Weaving in and out of this imaginary architecture is a complex machine—panels slide back to reveal spinning disks, fragile connections and interlocking parts. At the mural’s centre, a fireplace opens—Maxwell Smart style—to reveal a hidden passageway. Wall panels appear to slide back, revealing text: on one side ‘Read More’, on the other ‘Work Less’. Cryptic icons embedded in the architecture enhance this sense of a hidden order.
The mural covers one large wall of the gallery, harmonising with the moulded skirtings and cast iron pillars of the space. While painting convention suggests the canvas as a window to another world, the mural suggests an extension of the architecture, a passage into another building. Mural #1 evokes every boy’s dream of a Bond-villain style lair, a place both whimsical and sinister.
In grey-greens, purple and acrid chartreuse, the mural combines two illustrative traditions: the intricate playfulness of children’s books, of images full of pop-ups and pull-outs and hidden figures, and the covers of sci-fi novels with their evocative, photo-realist depictions of uninvented technologies. The image’s saccharine and coal dust vibe evokes Steam Punk, a genre of science fiction with messed up technological timelines. Steam Punk suggests an alternative history in which rationalist modernism has not taken charge of production, and the ornate engineering of the Victorians, the crystal palaces and acanthus-bedecked cast iron are melded with cellphones and inter-continental ballistic missiles.
Extending