My Marine Lake gallery doesn’t just show you aliens—it sells you a ticket to them. Working in the bold, optimistic visual language of 1920s and 1930s travel poster artists, I reimagine UFO contact as the ultimate holiday destination. Think A.M. Cassandre’s streamlined trains meeting a silver disc from Boötes. Think Roger Broders’ crisp coastal panoramas, but instead of a steamship cutting through azure waves, a luminous craft hovers over Marine Lake’s promenade, its running lights timed to the town’s neon. Every composition is a block of saturated color—Veronica blue, chrome yellow, seafoam green—with a single sans-serif caption: “Boötes. 22 Light Years. Change at Marine Lake.”
What makes this work astonishing is how perfectly alien contact adopts the poster artist’s grammar. The UFOs are never messy or ominous—they are sleek, center-staged, almost advertised. The beings from Boötes, glimpsed in silhouette against frosted glass and georgian-style railings, might be travellers checking a timetable. And I do understand that the great travel posters of the 1930s promised not just a place, but a transformation. Here, that transformation is intergalactic: you arrive by tram to Marine Lake, and you leave by thought-beam to Arcturus. The art deco bandstand becomes a departure lounge. The boating lake becomes a landing strip for consciousness. It is joyous, retro-futurist, and utterly unlike any UFO art you have seen—because in Topping’s world, the aliens came not to conquer, but for the weekend. And they brought excellent typography.
