Entering Milly Skellington’s exhibition titled An alternate ending to a tale of two cities one will encounter an immersive environment of images, texts, and objects that seem to belong both to a recent past and an emerging future. Named for Charles Dickens’s 19th Century historical novel that chronicled the French Revolution and the subsequent Reign of Terror, the story recalls a society on the brink of a seemingly progressive transformation, simultaneously plagued by the folly of radical idealism. The title also alludes to Martin Kippenberger’s famed and final work The happy end of Kafka’s Amerika, where the artist envisions the finale of the unfinished narrative as an installation mostly of workaday office furniture and mundane leisure activities. It’s not entirely clear how Skellington might rewrite Dickens’s celebrated magnum opus—situated now in modern day London, where the artist briefly attended Goldsmith College of Art, and his hometown Los Angeles instead of Revolution-era Paris—but considering the artist’s tongue-in-cheek persona that often humorously approaches exhibition-making through the lens of a fictitious blockbuster film producer, it seems Skellington plans to recreate an outrageous Hollywood ending for Dickens’s masterwork.

Alluding to the unexpected features of our own contemporary epoch of incredulity, Skellington’s dystopian setting includes an interactive chatbot that regurgitates lines from Dickens’s titular novel, Mike Davis’s City of quartz, 1990’s, LA-based, cult-classic film Clueless, and Peter Bogdanovich’s The last picture show; a project that similarly examined America’s changing technological and cultural landscape of the early 1950’s. Monumental paintings—digitally manipulated, ink-jet printed, and heat-transferred on canvas—place ominous inflections on otherwise popular icons. A kaleidoscopic, menacing portrait of Princess Diana and a science-fiction movie logo, once a picture of perfect fairytail endings, might evoke the wave of online conspiratorial malinformation that encircles the legacy of the British Royal Family, the American entertainment industry, and a seemingly pervasive conglomerate of multi-disciplinary celebrities with rumored secrets and suspicious associations. A handmade, automated machine emulates a painter’s physical gesture—a technique that references both an obscure hacker-hobbyist practice of altering programs to operate on incompatible hardware and ambitious contemporary efforts to integrate printing methods into the trajectory of fine-art.

Despite the alarming or uncanny sensation of watching Skellington’s machine revisit the art-historical arc of the 20th Century, much like Dickens’s duplicitous and often recited introduction to A tale of two cities.

Skellington addresses the potential for social upheaval with wry wit and kitschy commercialism rather than all- out dread, considering the twee English knick-knacks and domesticated décor. While Skellington’s practice itself emphasizes the predominance and effects of algorithmic technologies, the seemingly inevitable elimination of large sectors of creative and physical labor, and the ubiquitous doomsday prophesizing of internet culture, the outcome of this transformation remains largely unpredictable. Much like Skellington’s work that oscillates between an emphasis on artistic invention and the impossibility of creative autonomy, the future might well exist somewhere between a cultural utopia and a robot apocalypse. Instead of these oppositions, we might arrive at a still yet unknown, potentially naïve, but hopeful place: a better land where I trust we will be mercifully sheltered.

Milly Skellington (b. 1993, Los Angeles) studied at Goldsmith College in London and Otis College in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in exhibitions at El Clasificado Space in Los Angeles, New Space Lewisham in London, and Cody Wycoff Space in Brooklyn, NY. This is his second solo show at Hyacinth Gallery. Skellington is currently featured in the upcoming group exhibition at Europa in the Lower East Side and New Uncanny Gallery in Harlem.

A solo exhibition by Milly Skellington titled A tale of two cities: in wood and stone will run concurrently at Galerie Timonier in Tribeca.