My fellow Americans. As a young boy, I dreamed of being a baseball, but tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.’- Kodos, Treehouse of Horror VII

‘…truth   and…wonder   in   this   country.   For…energy   and…inaction…love to move forward to…the exact same spot.   In the end…time…needs all of you to deliver…the future.’- Excerpt from text edited from a presidential speech, part of Lauren Marsden’s Set for an Altered State, 2011

A tying off of sorts for her (productive) time spent in California, Set for an Altered State at Sight School in Oakland is Lauren Marsden’s first solo installation. The installation is a well conceived set of objects comprising a single, complete, immersive work. A cast off swim suit and sash of Miss Department of Energy (one of Marsden’s characters)  sit in a pile of sand with a souvenir postcard of a de-ribbon cutting at a nuclear site decommissioning sits off to the side. There is a lectern with a remixed presidential speech (mashing power/energy, patriotism, and unity), a glitchy projection of idyllic wind turbines before a super blue sky, a pair of stage lights on the floor, and a , loud industrial fan activating a large, impossibly beautiful golden flag which emphatically flutters-  all situated in the flat black gallery.

These disparate and charged objects create an odd delicacy whose constituency is the West, the abstraction which seems to have captivated Marsden in her time here. Working usually in a more performative mode, she has created a cast of characters which initially appear simply displaced in time, but can more accurately be described as estranged from a time that never was, or as shadow versions of timeless ideals. Neither bogged down by nostalgia or irony, they highlight dreams just beyond unreachable horizons. They break ground, christen ships, take moments for scenic portraits before shipping off to Vietnam. One such character, Mildred “Millie” Garrison raises a flag boasting of “Vast Untapped Potential”. In Set for an Altered State, the objects themselves suggest a similar boast, a world of radical self reliance in which the very elements of the earth fuel its colonization. If one schema, that of extracting energy from matter itself, is to be forsaken, another, harvesting wind, gracefully rises to fill the void.

But these utopic systems ape dreams of self-reliance, of ‘all ships rising with the tide’, and are instead instantly subsumed into markets of capital and exchange- gusts to gold. The world depicted here has a similar relation to the viewer. Standing in the gallery we feel on stage, or as if the various objects are props to be activated like a toy box, but I think the truth of the matter is less participational. Marsden depicts a universe in which we are sidelined by double-speak and luxury, by a politic which is close-enough or least-of-evils. There are no solutions here, projects of unity and energy are transposed into means of perpetuation, a shadow version of sustainability. Set for an Altered State is a wonderful parting note from an outsider whose vision of this place was welcome, and hopefully will not be gone for long.