While recently updating my website, I realized my neglect in sharing my favorite artistic triumph of 2010. The following images are the collective effort of a favorite group of collaborators, with my work as the stylist and creative director of costume design, hair, and makeup.
Band: TEACHERS, (the musical project of Ben Bronfman!) Director: Mike Anderson, Producer: Mickey Heffernan, Director of Photography: Ryan Dickie, Stylist: Molly Gottschalk, Costume Design: Paul Cupo, Molly Gottschalk, Nicholas Mendise, Savannah Wyatt, Make-up: Danilo Omo, Hair: Brian Buenaventura.
For further images or inquiries on upcoming projects, please contact me at mollygottschalk@gmail.com
With the help of Hanna Barbera and Aldous Huxley, creators of The Jetsons and A Brave New World, respectively, ideals of the future are manufactured and instilled in our minds and loom in impending doom, as always, just around the corner. Permanently affixed as mere premonitions, these concepts are too enveloped in their placement as “the future” to be recognized by society as they approach our lives and appear in our surroundings with increasing omnipresence. Barbera and Huxley may have been incredible story tellers, however more notably should be viewed in their role as shamans of the future. They envisioned a world and painted it for us in 24-bit color and equally variegated literature. They taught us to anticipate a space age filled with highly advanced technological gadgets, populated by a pharmaceutically complacent and sedated humanity.
While speculating over these predictions, I use the universal digital library of information popularly known as Google to research such concepts further. Upon viewing the results for the search terms “The Jetsons,” I find myself in the dull and seemingly prehistoric present day, fantasizing about robotic devices and clever technological inventions. I set my laptop computer aside when interrupted by a call on my iPhone, but return at once upon completion of my conversation with a friend in California, ignorant of the irony in my eagerness to continue researching “the future”.
When I read A Brave New World, I imagined an existence as far from the present as it is from reality. Not dissimilar to the books I read about the future and programs I watched supporting its allure, I was entirely void of cognizance in a world which simultaneously fulfilled its prophecies.
My dismal mood is accredited to these revelations. Aside from the fact that in many ways, modern technology has highly surpassed such predictions of the future, I am more so affected by my contemplation of the Soma pill used to sedate and resolve discontentment.
Modern medicine has managed to scratch the branded s-o-m-a from the infamous pills and restructure both their appearance and appeal. They are successfully camouflaged and hide in their masquerade behind mirrors of medicine cabinets, nestled in the pockets of troubled teens, or beneath the bottomless drawers of their equally plagued predecessors. No, I am not against pharmaceutical drugs or psychosomatic medicines. I am, however, highly against their abuse.
We can determine the termination of our involvement with The Jetsons by a simple touch of a button, or evade this Brave New World through the closing of a book. We think nothing more of these fantastic ideas in our daily lives when taking pills to slightly soften the reality of the day, or alternatively, to avoid it altogether.
I have lost my two greatest friends to abuse of prescription pharmaceutical pills. Science has progressed from fiction to fact and it is with this realization that I anxiously await the sequel to these foreboding and consummate predictions.
We have created a society we cannot endure with sobriety. I am left to wonder how all of this might one day be reversed. If only there were some sort of pill …
