The Hastings Gallery

📮 Postcards from Elsewhere: A Visual Archive of Memory, Mood, and Municipal Fantasy by a docent who once dated a horizon and never quite recovered.

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There are postcard series that document travel. Others commemorate architecture, commemorate sunsets, memorialize landmarks with the emotional weight of a thumbtack. And then there’s Postcards—Terry Hastings' visual anthology of semi-fictional atmospheres, emotional topographies, and civic longing disguised as geometric abstraction.

To engage with Postcards is to enter a realm where each image behaves less like scenery and more like character. Striped sunsets, looming basins, and triangulated cul-de-sacs don’t just offer views; they speak, remember, and sometimes critique the zoning board. What Hastings offers isn’t a catalog of place, but a dramatic landscape of memory staging itself—one gradient at a time.

Act I: The Myth of the Horizon

Early entries in the Postcards canon establish an allegiance not to realism, but to resonance. Pieces like “Morning Reflection” and “Stillness” don’t depict the world; they suggest it. Horizontal bands of color evoke sky, land, and water, but remain stubbornly abstract—as if nature were trying minimalism for the first time and absolutely nailing it.

The magic lies in what’s withheld. With each piece, Hastings omits just enough detail to give viewers full interpretive agency. The trapezoid in “Morning Reflection”? A shadow, a portal, a pool, a mirror staging its own sunrise. A vessel of quiet momentum. These are images in conversation with longing—tidy, theatrical, and emotionally organized.

Act II: Regional Specificity with Altitude

Then come the landscapes. The basin, the valley, the foothills. At first glance, they appear serene, strata of blues and browns folded like soft terrain. But pause longer, and these images crack open as emotional cartography. “Heatrise” isn’t just a desert evening—it’s spiritual elevation with a star budget. “Basin”, later revised to reflect its LA origins from the Hollywood Hills and Mulholland Drive, acts as visual memoir: soft haze, geometric repose, civic nostalgia written in gradients.

That’s the shift. Postcards ceases to be an aesthetic exercise and becomes a dramaturgical system—a fictionalized regional map where each piece stands in for memory, mood, and identity. Hastings has effectively turned the American landscape into a cast of recurring characters.

Act III: Yelp Meets Poetry

A turning point in the series lies in its framing. Rather than relying on formal art descriptions or poetic obscurity, Hastings adopts the guise of fictional Yelp reviews—cheeky, theatrical, and emotionally tuned. Suddenly, “Tulip Fields Forever” becomes not just a piece of abstraction, but a sassy floral lineup evaluated by an ex-designer with intimacy issues. “Signs of Spring” is reviewed by someone recovering from pastel avoidance. “Lighthouse” gets critiqued by a longshore cryptographer who swears he once dated a fog bank.

This is where the series truly shines. The reviews are not just commentary—they’re part of the art. Each piece is recontextualized through fictional voices, imagined personas, and regional myth-making. It’s theatrical dramaturgy disguised as user-generated content. And in doing so, Postcards invites not just interpretation, but participation. Viewers can imagine their own docents, their own Yelp riffs, their own alternate readings. The canon expands.

Act IV: Civic Connection & Municipal Desire

With “Connection”, the series leans fully into visual storytelling with signage, typography, and place-naming. Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs appear linked by stylized geometry and municipal longing. It’s not just a visual—it’s a statement: that geography, memory, and identity are forever enmeshed.

The use of real place names grounds the myth in reality, while the surreal composition lifts it back into fiction. Viewers are asked to consider the emotional meaning of their own hometowns, civic histories, and regional pride. Can signage be intimate? Can gradients function as cultural commentary?

Apparently, yes.

Act V: Dispatches from a Canon That’s Always Evolving

By the time we reach “Distant”, “Seaside Sunrise”, and “Mountain Sunset”, the series has matured—not into resolution, but into spaciousness. These late-stage pieces suggest not just landscape, but time. They behave like visual letters from memory’s quieter corners. Less declarative, more contemplative. If early works shouted with color, these sigh.

And yet the theatricality remains. The reviews are still voiced, staged, and self-aware. Hastings resists preciousness, keeps humor sharp, and allows each piece to hold both sincerity and subversion.

The result? A canon that refuses gentrification, resists finality, and keeps space open for new voices. Postcards is a living archive—a fictionalized journey through the familiar, the half-remembered, and the brilliantly made-up.

Final Scene: Yours to Rewrite

Ultimately, Postcards isn't a collection. It's a conversation. Between color and commentary. Between viewer and voice. Between Terry Hastings and the fictional community he's built—a chorus of docents, windmill nieces, retired planners, emotional cartographers, and municipal archivists with very strong opinions.

And like any good postcard, each piece arrives slightly before you realize you need it.