“Advertising fogs our daily lives less from its peculiar lies than from its peculiar truths,” Daniel Boorstin declared in his 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Seemingly truer than ever in our post-truth era, this notion offers an apt point of departure for considering William Powhida‘s paintings critiquing the status quo reflected in Artforum ads. Titled “After ‘After the Contemporary,'” this show at Charlie James incarnates a futuristic 2050 retrospective of Powhida’s fabricated “Contemporary Period” of art history encompassing 2000-2025. One hundred twenty 15″x 15″ watercolors portraying Artforum ads are hung in a salon-style grid evoking a candy-colored columbarium for bygone blue-chip exhibitions. The period from 2000 to now depicts actual ads; the rest are predictive figments of the artist’s prescient fancy. Powhida’s sardonic prognostications emerge seamlessly from the past. Perusing the future, we see that monopolistic corporations continue co-opting art; entertainers and politicians show at celebrated galleries; radical becomes mainstream. By contriving his show around an intercalary period, Powhida slyly parallels the insidious slippery-slope mixture of reality and fiction pervading advertising, the art world and society overall. Even the show’s title echoes the era-centric linguistic absurdity of terms such as “post-modern.” Hyperreality has devolved into post-truth. “As never before in art, it has become easy for the great, the famous, and the cliché to be synonymous,” Boorstin observed over 50 years ago. Powhida’s timeline ends with a parody of Bruno Bischofberger’s pastoral ad that appears on every Artforum back cover. Some things never change.

Charlie James Gallery
969 Chung King Rd.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Show runs through Mar. 3