Time Machine

Los Angeles 5025 imagines the city three thousand years from now, rendered as a single crowded block of Melrose Avenue in which the familiar and the unthinkable coexist without comment. Humans, aliens of several distinct species, cyborgs, and robots share the footpath in the unhurried way that Angelenos have always shared space — jostling for the same patch of sidewalk, ignoring one another with practiced ease. No hierarchy is established between them; they simply belong to the same city.

The sky above is equally inhabited. UAPs drift at altitude alongside flying cars, and a robotic tree trimmer — blue, spindly, insistently municipal — tends to the street trees as though nothing has changed in the maintenance schedule. Hover cars line the kerb where sedans once parked. The palm trees remain. So do the Orthodox Jews, moving through the scene in black coats and wide brims, unchanged by three millennia in the way that only the genuinely committed are unchanged by anything. Cats claim the street as their own, threading between legs and loitering on warm concrete — the dominant animal of the strip, as they perhaps always were.

The architecture reads as Melrose — low commercial frontages, the occasional newer tower pushing south against a denser skyline — but the skyline itself has thickened considerably, new high-rises crowding a horizon that still holds its smog-softened light. A gym called Pumping Iron anchors the right of the canvas, its signage a direct homage to the bodybuilding culture that made this part of the city famous and that apparently survives every civilisational upheaval intact. Beside it, the Jane Kordansky Gallery announces its lineage in its name alone — a descendant, presumably, of the current LA dealer David Kordansky, still operating in the same city thirty centuries on.

The painting borrows the wide horizontal format of postwar American landscape painting, and Layne handles it with the eye of a production designer: the scene is lit for a film that hasn't been made, composed for a camera that doesn't yet exist, and packed with the kind of incidental detail that rewards the viewer who looks past the spectacle. Touches of 1990s nostalgia surface in the signage and street furniture — a reminder that Los Angeles has always recycled its own past even while selling the future.

At 122 × 152 cm, it is one of the two largest canvases in the exhibition, and was conceived as a companion piece to 150 Million Years Ago, the show's other deep-time landscape. Where that work looks backward, Los Angeles 5025 looks forward by the same impossible distance. The two were hung in separate rooms at Buckingham Street, encountered in sequence as visitors moved through the show — each one a terminus, the present somewhere in between.

150 Million Years Ago drops the viewer into the Late Jurassic — a landscape painted not from fossils or museum reconstructions, but from the kind of half-remembered images that float around any childhood imagination of dinosaurs. The light is clear and the sky familiar, yet nothing else in the scene belongs to any world a living person has walked through.

The time traveller and her German Shepherd move cautiously along a path in the foreground, the only figures who don't belong to this time. They press forward with the careful awareness of travellers who understand, without needing to be told, that the landscape around them operates by different rules. Behind them, Stegosauruses graze unhurriedly in the mid-ground, unaware — or indifferent — that they are being watched. In the shadowed bush at the back left, an Allosaurus peers through the dark foliage, its attention fixed on them. Along the right, Brachiosauruses move in the shallows of the river, their long necks sweeping down toward the water.

The painting refuses the documentary tone usually attached to prehistory and treats the era instead as a place that could simply be visited — stumbled into, even, by the wrong species at the wrong moment.

It was made as the deep-time counterweight to Los Angeles 5025 and shares its scale and ambition. The two were hung in separate rooms at Buckingham Street, encountered in sequence as visitors moved through the show — each one a terminus, the present somewhere in between.

Tokyo 2174 arrives at the exhibition's most sensory destination — a future Japan that has kept everything that makes Tokyo Tokyo and simply turned the volume up. The neon is brighter, the street is fuller, the signage more insistent, and the cherry blossom tree on the left blooms with the same stubborn grace it always has, indifferent to the robots sharing the footpath beneath it.

The Hello Kitty billboard dominates the mid-left facade, marking 200 years of the character's cultural reign — apparently some brands are simply non-negotiable across centuries. McDonald's has also survived, its yellow archways a reliable beacon in any time zone, and E. Honda loiters outside it in a manner that suggests he has always been there and always will be. The Street Fighter aesthetic bleeds into the crowd more broadly: figures dressed for combat in a city that treats spectacle as civic infrastructure.

The time traveller and her German Shepherd cross at the intersection on the right, moving through the scene with the practised calm of people who have already survived the Jurassic. By Tokyo 2174, a cyberpunk streetscape populated with robots, cosplayers, and two-hundred-year-old cartoon icons barely warrants a second glance.

At 51 × 61 cm the painting punches well above its size — dense with incident, lit like a film set, and constructed with the same affection for urban chaos that runs through the rest of the series.

Nighthawks 1942 places Layne's time travellers inside one of the most recognisable images in American art. The woman and her German Shepherd are visible through the glass, moving along the sidewalk behind the counter — present in the scene but not of it, passing through 1942 the way travellers pass through any city they don't intend to stay in.

Hopper's diner is otherwise faithfully reconstructed: the three patrons, the counter attendant, the Phillies sign, the late-night stillness that has made the original so endlessly reproduced. Layne doesn't disturb the composition so much as slip two figures into its margins, and in doing so quietly shifts what the painting is about. The isolation Hopper built so carefully is still there — but now there are witnesses to it, and they're only passing through.

The date in the title is not incidental. 1942 is a destination, a coordinate the painting has been set to, and the figures outside the glass are the clearest sign that someone chose it deliberately.

Bondi 1985 places the time travellers on a towel in the middle of a busy summer afternoon — a pause in the journey rather than a destination with stakes. The woman and her German Shepherd have landed in a Bondi that neither of them belongs to, in a year that carries its own quiet significance: 1985 is the year Layne was born, and the figures sit among beachgoers whose age would have matched his parents' generation.

The painting is composed from the colour world of mid-1980s Australian beach photography — chemical pinks, faded ultramarines, the slightly off-true skin tones of early Kodachrome — reconstructing a Sydney summer the artist knows only through cultural memory and the residue that era left on film.

At 51 × 61 cm it is one of the smaller works in the show, but it earns its place among the more ambitious canvases. After the Jurassic and 1942 New York, there is something deliberately unhurried about two travellers simply lying in the sun — watching a crowd that has no idea what they've just come from, or where they're going next.

Roman Bath House is one of the smallest paintings in the exhibition and the one that most openly wears its influences. Layne works directly from Lawrence Alma-Tadema's The Frigidarium — the Victorian master's marble-white reconstruction of Imperial Rome — and inserts his time traveller into the scene with characteristic ease. She stands in the foreground in a dark gown, being dressed by a Roman attendant, her contemporary sneakers and clothes in a pile on the marble floor beside her. The dog, meanwhile, is being patted by the pool, entirely unbothered by the two thousand year displacement.

Where the other paintings in the show place the travellers at the margins — observing, passing through — here she has gone native. The modern clothing discarded on the ground is the only evidence that she doesn't belong, and nobody in the room appears to have noticed.

Alma-Tadema built his career on making ancient Rome feel inhabited and sensory rather than monumental. Layne borrows that quality and quietly updates it — the bathhouse remains opulent and unhurried, but it now contains a visitor who arrived from somewhere the Romans don't have a word for.