Utopia calling

What's it like to inhabit Saya Woolfalk's world of plant-human hybrids?

- HILARIE M. SHEETS

In a science-fiction cosmology imagined by multidisciplinary artist Saya Woolfalk, a group of people discover bones from a future race sent back in time.

A fungus on the bones allows the finders to transform genetically — becoming part human and part plant — and to perceive the world through one another's eyes. Called the Empathics, these hybrid beings take part in rituals like joining their heads and communing in a floral starburst.

The details may sound a bit absurd. "Do we actually want to become plant people?" Woolfalk said with amusement at her studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York City, on the eve of the biggest show of her career. Titled "Empathic Universe", at the Museum of Arts and Design (or MAD) in New York, this retrospective — her first — unfolds a narrative that Woolfalk has built in chapters over the past two decades.

Visitors can step into Woolfalk's fantastical and playful landscape, which features sculptures, videos, paintings, works on paper and performances and is on view through Sept 7.

"Empathic Universe" introduces the elaborate and rather goofy backstory of her cast of characters in vibrant sculptural tableaus and narrative video performances on the 4th floor, then treats the 5th floor as a hallucinatory environment with an ethereal soundscape — what it might look and feel like to inhabit such a world.

Projected animations in deep blues, purples, reds and greens — washing over a suspended explosion of glass elements and wallpaper with dizzying patterns that is hung with collages and figurative sculptures adorned in brilliant textiles — make everything feel moving and alive.

Woolfalk said she hoped the installation would be seductive enough to draw people in while making them question what exactly was going on. "I'm always trying to facilitate disorientation," she said, "and part of that does have to do with being multiracial."