Robyn Foster’s exhibition “Warped” plays on popular notions of science fiction,  propelling viewers onto the B-movie set. Warp suggests a mental leap into fantasy, but also recalls the “warp drive” of Star Trek – the means for breaking the light barrier to travel great galactic distances. Science fact often being the present tense of science fiction, it is no surprise that a version of “warp drive” has actually been theorized: space-time can be distorted in front of and behind an object, creating a propulsion system caused by the literal warping of space. The actual science of warp, however, shares something with our popular imagination – the curve.

Past images of the future appear dated now, but are still seductive. The sterile white spheres of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey reflect the design of the time – Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal in New York from 1963 and George Nelson’s molecular-inspired “Ball Clock” from 1950 signal a trust in the machine-like, the scientific and a fascination with aerospace. The sphere is also the shape of molecular mass. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome was based on the principle of the closest “packing” of molecules – like oranges stacked for display at the supermarket. This idea, the basis of scientific molecular modeling, found flight in design. Within science fiction, these utopian visions offered pure white and chrome surfaces, sleek machine-formed plastics and vinyl space suits supported by equally utopian bodies with all the right curves.

Robyn Foster picks up on this fascination but warps it, a distortion which in turn creates a more accurate view of our present. Taking a cue from 60s design, her synthetic materials and curved surfaces reference this era, but Foster combines this with another view of science fiction – the B-movie. With hastily constructed sets and monsters made from cardboard and foam,  these movies were more hilarious than scary. Even Star Trek episodes have this maquette-aesthetic, which never found its way into the high modernism of 60s design. Foster uses cartoonish science fiction as a vehicle for deflating utopian visions of the future.

Her staged universe is like a film set – fake backdrops and costumes ready for action. Sleek curves and machine-formed surfaces are replaced by bulky outfits, sprawling organic shapes and psychedelic colours. Rather than Barbarella-style cat-suits, Foster’s costumes are massively awkward in their hyperbole, made not to fit real bodies, but to emphasize their imperfection and engulf viewers/wearers in their presence. Foster creates peep-holes and orifices, allowing the alien body to spill through the vinyl veneer. Her otherworldly visions are hybrids of retro-futures and contemporary nostalgic memories.

Frederic Jameson suggests that science fiction does not envision the future per se, but instead re-frames the present to see it more clearly. Foster’s warped world can be viewed as a questioning of contemporary nostalgia for a future-past-perfect, substituting instead the reality of the present – imperfection, contradiction and lack of resolution. While Foster offers an immediate and fantastic escape, the implications are all-too-familiar: walk-through conduits lead nowhere; the “researcher” and the “mutant” look eerily similar; weapons are fictive, allowing the fantasy to continue ad infinitum. “Warped” re-stages our twisted reality, making light of the failures of progress while reminding us of our own limits in the present.