FROZEN IN TIME

For the past two decades a floating cosmonaut has appeared as a recurring character in the stilled dramas of Jeremy Geddes’ paintings, an isolated observer examining the urban landscapes of modern municipal bedroom communities, the iconic weightlessness of this airy astronaut emphasizing the lonely emptiness of the cityscape.

For Gen-Xers, the astronaut must be a shadow vision of David Bowie‘s iconic mariner Major Tom, who was launched, lost, and left in space in the summer night of July ‘69 when flaming boosters shot his capsule into the visionary void to float alone in synthesized silence with circuits dead.

The real astronauts of the Apollo mission that landed men on the moon returned to the ground, but Major Tom didn’t. He entered the eternity of space. Now, in Geddes’ paintings he revisits the planet he left behind, a man who fell to earth to float bemused and adrift as a suspended time traveler, a visitor from the idealistic past witnessing the hard present. The utopian idealism of the 1960s has long ago vanished since his liftoff, and he drifts ghostlike over scruffy streets, windswept and weightless, a strange visitor to this alien and ordinary planet.

Geddes was in New York when the vicious winds of Hurricane Sandy smashed homes and pushed the ocean inland to fill the subways with seawater, and the storm surge turned streets into rivers flowing through skyscraper canyons. Walking for supplies in the calm after the storm, he was astonished to witness the damage—the face of a nearby building was peeled from its frame and thrown as rubble to the road, exposing the interiors. Once concealed and private refuges, these personal spaces were turned into an obscene scenography for an unwanted audience of strangers on the street. Armchairs and appliances, cushions and kitchens, framed and frozen by the precise cut of the stormy proscenium. The shocking but formal wreck haunted him, and surely influenced his art, as he imagined places where a strange order of missiles sliced away the walls of ordinary homes in perfect circles and rectangles.