Framed against a starlit sky, two female figures with feathered hair and large, limpid eyes sit astride blue and purple kangaroos. Their lush, naked bodies are stark white against a vibrant canvas of marks, lines, and dots. They stare out of pictorial space into an unknown distance, with their detached gazes separated from the viewer’s own perusal of them. Disengaged from us, their distance forms[…..]

In the 21st-century lexicon of urban development, the term utopia has all but vanished from the descriptors of a contemporary city. It’s more comfortably consigned to the archaic vocabulary of 18th-century academia. Yet it remains a silent ideological underpinning of economic policies, an elusive goal that governments strive toward but leave unacknowledged—seen, for instance, in laws forbidding “transgressive” behavior, constant political entanglements, or even in perpetual urban[…..]