Severe Optimism is Dotan Appelbaum’s first solo show after receiving his MFA. This new body of work was exhibited at Mercer University’s McEachern Art Center from October 3–November 13th, 2025
Artist Statement
Severe Optimism looks to William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement as a guide for navigating the turbulent present. Much like the 19th century, today’s industrial changes—the rise of AI, overwhelming digital acceleration, and ecological collapse—destabilize labor, culture, and our sense of futurity. To pursue methods for coping with industrial transformation, I began by translating Morris’s ‘Acanthus’ wallpaper into marquetry. The other two patterns of my own design in this body of work—Honey Locust Thorns, and American Chestnut with Blight—use botanical forms to explore protection, loss, and the shifting severity of the natural world. They reflect a tension between utopian hope and practical reality, between the desire for humane making and the conditions that continually challenge it.
The work negotiates between traditional analogue ways of making and contemporary technological precision, embracing both the intimacy of craft and the multiplicity of contemporary production. Exposed plywood edges and raw birch elements highlight an honesty of construction that echoes Arts and Crafts values while acknowledging the materials and technologies of today. The resulting furniture forms—distillations of Arts and Crafts typologies—operate as objects rooted in this moment, but reaching across time. Morris, and the Arts and Crafts makers he inspired, sought a timelessness rooted in particular histories while making use of the technologies of their present—ultimately producing cultural objects that could belong to no time but their own. At a moment when the narratives that once structured history are collapsing, I see pastiche not as imitation but as method: a way of assembling fragments of the past to make sense of the present. Severe Optimism asks how we might endure a world that is increasingly severe, and how careful, honest, and historically attentive making can help us cope with what comes next.
Photograph by Rob Chron
Grotesque Imagination (Acanthus by William Morris)
assorted wood veneers, baltic birch plywood
45 x 60 in.
Photograph by Rob Chron
Love of Change
assorted wood veneers, baltic birch plywood
45 x 60 in.
Photograph by Rob Chron
Unconstrained Nature
assorted wood veneers, baltic birch plywood
45 x 60 in.
Photographs by Rob Chron
Chair (Acanthus by William Morris)
assorted wood veneers, baltic birch plywood, brass
17 x 17 x 36 in.
Photographs by Rob Chron
Table (Honey Locust Thorns)
assorted wood veneers, baltic birch plywood, brass
20 x 20 x 17 in.
Photographs by Rob Chron
Shelf (American Chestnut with Blight)
assorted wood veneers, baltic birch plywood, brass
10 x 24 x 36 in.
Monotonic Artifacts #4, 6, 16, 17, 28, and 30
Medium density fiberboard
Various dimensions