According to Lauren Davies, Fabulandia's curator, this first of a two-part exhibition (Fauna opens in January 2006) presents six artists' speculations on "the world of the future…an overloaded world that meshes the natural with the artificial in a landscape filled with sleek urban-scapes, extraordinary gardens and terrains of the impossible…where low-tech and high-tech collide in a hybridized vision of the future."

It sounds a bit like a description of the 1982 sci-fi thriller Blade Runner, which actually managed to be prophetic in its way. In contrast Fabulandia: Terra, the show—the work that comprises the exhibition—falls wide of its lofty curatorial premise. With the exception of Philip Ross' drawings (though even his work seems somewhat nostalgic in this context) the work in the show seems to me to be far more about the past and the present than the future.

What the disparity between the curatorial premise and the work in Fabulandia: Terra reveals is this group of artists' attitudes about the future. It is definitely not utopic, but neither is it dystopic. Instead it is steadfastly ambivalent about the future, and in some cases, nostalgic for the past. As in Tonya Thornton's "Easter Pageant". The installation (quite similar to her MFA show at Mills) consists of two cone-shaped shrubs made of plastic foliage. One is adult-sized and the other child-sized. Each has a protrusion ending in an eyeball-like bulb. The tall one cranes toward the short one that looks up eagerly. I've witnessed the same drama between parent and child in line at the grocery store. Only in Thornton's installation the scene is rendered as Seussian shrubbery and has the feel of a meticulous window display complete with a music box lullaby and chirping bird sounds. The work basks in nostalgia for childhood and not just any childhood, but Thornton's own.

The same could be said of Genevieve Quick's work. At the back of the gallery is her sculpture "TerraVision", which features a stage prop-quality remake of a 1960's television set. On the screen a glowing, black and white wilderness whirs slowly by. It begins to get at some of the contradictions inherent in looking at images of the "natural" landscape—being at once closer and further removed—but I found it too diagrammatic. Her other sculpture in the show is better at linking childhood imagination with contemporary ways of depicting landscape. "Wunderland" is a model-scale land mass, roughly four feet across, that projects from the wall at (my) chest level. It appears as though it may be the fragment of a much larger model which gives "Wunderland" a meteor-like quality. Its topography is made of sand and interspersed with lime green pools, spiky grasses, and colorful patches that look like cartoon fungus. I was reminded of my visit to Mono Lake—its Tufa towers and saline waters—and the strange (and beautiful) landscapes that can emerge due to human interventions in natural processes.

Nearby, in the opposite corner, is Carrie Lederer's "Offering". This aptly named work (the inventory of which would easily fill a page or two of its own) features hundreds of carefully arranged objects, most of which are one form or another of artificial approximations of natural elements. Some are found, others manipulated by the artist (most notably the painted gourds and one of the artist's verdant, baroque paintings on canvas). The accumulation covers the walls and floor with a number of objects suspended from the ceiling. It is visually dense and green and reminds me of my grandmother's crafty centerpieces from the 1970's: orange wax mushroom candles sprouting from shellacked driftwood. The installation is successful in that it is both mesmerizing and a convincing approximation of the visual complexity and unity of "wild" spaces. And it does feel like an offering—like an outsized road side memorial to a recently deceased family member or a shrine to some unseen woodland spirit—but like these Carrie Lederer's "Offering" feels like it is intended for someone other than me.

In the middle of the space are James Sansing's architectural interventions: "Melting Column", "Invisible Column", and "Support System". The first two are a sort of minimalism rendered in a funk aesthetic which I found to be quite satirical and funny, but the later, "Support System", confused me. Constructed of cast cement, tiny bricks, bits of plumbing, and string, "Support System" looks like the remains of a long ago abandoned village built by very small people (think of Charles Simonds dwellings for "Little People", only less detailed). "Support System" would seem to constitute a departure from the thinking that informed the other two column pieces, but it uses similar materials and is attached to one of the gallery's columns. So Sansing's three pieces read as a trilogy. I'm sure the artist is aware of this, but his intention is lost on me.

Less nostalgic, perhaps not nostalgic at all, are Philip Ross' series of water color, color pencil, and pen "Drawings for Plant Life Support Systems". These drawings, which are variously conceptual sketches and proposals for things Ross has actually built or intends to build, were the only catalyst for thinking about the future I found in the show. The drawings are whimsical, loose and not very detailed, but evocative enough to engage my imagination as to how these "support systems" would be realized and what they might do. There are some unfortunate digital prints of some of the working support systems and text describing the project pinned to the wall next to the drawings. Unfortunate because they detracted from my musings and only made me want to see the real things.

David Hamill's drawings also do not appear nostalgic though they are not obviously about the future either. The two (virtually indistinguishable) series: "Sequence 15" and "Ideological Reconstruction" seem to be the product of a focused artist's attention bound by self-imposed parameters, or rules for making the drawings. To put it another way, the drawings look to be the result of a predetermined process. This sounds like a general statement that could be applied to many artists' work, but Hamill's drawings are extremely methodical and precise. In the two series on display typographic forms provide a starting point for complex and convoluted structures of perspectival lines. From a distance these structures look a bit like crystalline forms gone awry—up-close they have a more digital appearance, like a CAD drawing (according to Hamill's statement this is how the drawings are derived.) which, despite the warm graphite and soft water color, makes them rather cold. To me Hamill's drawings are the most thorough and subtle example of the "low-tech and high-tech collide". And they work to illuminate how humans are changing along with technology.

Though the individual works in Fabulandia: Terra are interesting and merit discussion, I left The Lab wondering why a show organized around envisioning the future failed to do so. It most certainly seems like a failure of the imagination (either on the part of the curator or the artists themselves). But I wondered too if I would feel comfortable (or capable of) making any such predictions in a world moving so quickly that comprehending the present seems a far more daunting task than contemplating the year 3012. This is perhaps the core problem with Fabulandia: Terra: any worthy vision of the future needs to be mindful of the past with a foot squarely planted in the present otherwise it is just fantasy. So to envision the future one must reckon with the present and the past then take a step toward what is unkown. This is certainly no simple task, but in the context of a show about the future one would certainly expect the artists to make an attempt and present their visions.

Fabulandia: Terra is on view at The Lab ( http://www.thelab.org/ ) through October 29th, 2005.