I recently received the latest letter from my brother, who moved to Virginia last summer for a teaching position. He's eloquent and self-aware, something that comes out in conversation if you know him well, but even more so in his thoughtful, candid letters. On Facebook, our connections consist of posting internet memes on each other's profile pages and links to sarcasm filled web comics. Just jabs to say hello and fill in the strangeness of growing up close and moving apart. But without these letters, in which his life seems more tangible to me, we'd inevitably become strangers. So goes the way of today, when many relationships form and barely sustain themselves on less.

This is the consideration behind 1975 Gallery's newest show, currently inhabiting Booksmart Studio's Gallery Kunstler. "The Worst Is Yet to Come" explores our culture's dwindling willingness to truly connect. The exhibition is a collaboration between Don Pendleton of Dayton, Ohio, and Mark Penxa of Detroit, Michigan, two artists held in high regard for their designs in the skateboard industry with companies including Alien Workshop, Element, DC Shoe Co., and Girl skateboards.

"We're both at the age where we've seen things rise and kinda fall, mostly in terms of relationships and communication and how people deal with one another," says Pendleton. In the show and in discussion, the two lament the decline of communication with the rise of convenience-based technology, and younger generations who are "accustomed to these kind of impersonal transactions."

Penxa recalls his childhood when his grandmother lived two blocks away, "and she would write me four-page letters, front and back. Things like that just don't exist anymore," he says, adding that his mom lives 10 miles away and communicates with him mainly via Facebook.

The show consists of a narrative stretch of paintings by Pendleton, works by Penxa that speak of complete disconnect, and collaborative works by the two artists. Pendleton's geometric forms of cute and distraught creatures run from "Prologue" to "Epilogue," with a story in between, told in fragments of letters and chaos. Mountains of triangles (each symbolizing a human; connected ones create a family) dwell among handwritten letters, which shift to type, and eventually disappear. "The exchanges are what brings people together and what lets people relate to each other, and when you take that away, the thread that binds everything together is unraveled," says Pendleton. The scenes grow increasingly chaotic and sinister, until "Lights Out (aka "Chao Ab Ordo")", which is almost entirely black, holds the words, "No letters, no more words. TV ON. In the dark alone. LOL."

Penxa's pieces include four huge mixed-media paintings, where white washes over collage, with the vaguest color peeking through at the edges. They connote confusion, a fog, a comprehensible world as good as erased. The smaller works, which he calls "microscopic views" of the four larger ones, are "a bit more fatal, a prediction of the end result, where nothing really makes sense anymore [...] sort of giving this life-after-death scenario." They incorporate images and dark sarcasm with penciled script; the elusive and endangered cursive that is rapidly being replaced by typing classes. Acronyms like "LMFAO" in fancy cursive provide a jarring blend of worlds. In "A Collective Paranoia" a group of people listen to one reclining man's heart, and below, tiny lettering spells out "you have no new friend requests."

"Instead of having five really close friends, you end up having 50 people that you don't really know very well [...] and to people that are a lot younger than me, I don't think they know the difference," says Pendleton. "The promise was that the technology was going to link everyone together and create this network of communication and exchange, but I think it just failed. Or maybe we failed it, I don't know."

The gallery's middle wall holds the collaborative pieces, combining Pendleton's heavy-outlined geoforms and Penxa's collages, script, and white washing. One piece asks, "So are things going to be awkward now?" In another, the words "pen to paper, hand to hand, eye to eye" illustrate what the artists think is best.

Also included are some of Pendleton's collection of letters taped to a wall, with blacked-out names, but otherwise crushingly candid. "The nuance in writing these long, awkward letters to other people, that's when you give yourself away," says Pendleton. Also posted is a Terry Tempest Williams quote about the intimacy of letter writing. But we've traded love letters for "texts saying ‘I <3 u' or whatever," he says. "Now we've "stripped [it] down to the lowest common denominator, it's losing everything in terms of emotion and feeling."

The artists fear that convenience will continue to take the reins, but advise us all to more closely examine our lives. "I can't state enough that this is about observation," says Pendleton. "People need to stop and look around and think about what they're doing instead of mindlessly going through the motion because it's expected of them or it's easier." All of this combined, he says, lends itself to the "pessimistic viewpoint that if this is the last 20 years, what do the next 20 hold?"

"The Worst is Yet to Come: The Unfortunate Decay of Communication & Culture"

Works by Don Pendleton and Mark Penxa

Through September 25

1975 Gallery @ Booksmart Gallery Kunstler, 250 N. Goodman St.

1975ish.com

Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-6 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.