Days of Future Past presents a body of work by Eric Celarier made from discarded consumer materials. His work begins with the things we have made, used, and thrown away, then imagines what kind of future might grow from those remains. In his hands, detritus is crafted into fantastical life forms that feel both invented and oddly plausible.

I remember the first time I encountered Celarier’s “creatures” on display. I felt like a child seeing dinosaurs in a museum for the first time. They were funny, unsettling, and oddly convincing. They had the posture of scientific specimens, assembled and posed with the care of a skilled taxidermist. I found myself wondering how they might move, what sounds they might make, and what kind of world could have produced them. Were they relics from an alternative past or survivors from an apocalyptic future?

That unstable relationship to time and reality is central to Celarier’s work. His sculptures seem to belong to a natural history collection from a world slightly adjacent to our own, and his drawings carry a related ambiguity. They feel contemporary, but they also recall older visual traditions: technical illustration, science fiction, comic books, and the graphic languages we have used to picture the unknown. There is something nostalgic in the work, but it is not sentimental. It looks backward, forward, and sideways all at once.

The title, Days of Future Past, refers to the well-known Uncanny X-Men comic storyline in which survivors of a dark alternative reality send a warning back to the present. In that story, the future is not fixed. It is shaped by decisions still being made. I was drawn to that reference because comics often make big fears visible in direct, imaginative ways. They exaggerate reality, but they also clarify it.

That feels especially relevant now, as public attention turns toward artificial intelligence, automation, environmental collapse, and the fear that human-made systems may exceed our control. Celarier does not illustrate these anxieties directly. Instead, he imagines life after their consequences have taken form. His work asks us to look at the present as the material from which the future is already being built, and to consider what choices remain available to us.