All those soon-to-be world leaders gazing into the sunny future are actually scared children temporarily blinded by a photographer's lights. I lived in fear that the rhetoric of hope which was broadcast daily around my high school graduation was true. If the world's future was really in our hands, things looked bleak. Wasn't there a class at some other school which was brighter? Less vain? Ready to meet the challenge of being grown up? Evidently not. All those smiles; cheerful ones, anxious ones, sincere ones, and false ones, all those smiles were repeated in countless interchangeable high school year books. All those singular dramas of the arrogant bully and the teen crush were played elsewhere on other stages. Virgil Marti is there to remind us of all the vapidity of our lives. He does so with generosity and kindness; he's in on the joke. Wallpapering the stodgy Philadelphia Art Alliance with a faux library of beer cans collected in his youth, Mr. Marti imparts a look of ersatz respectability. Working in a vocabulary more rooted in interior design than fine art; Mr. Marti creates installations with fabric and wallpaper that poignantly, painfully induce nostalgic response. He received an M.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art and a B.F.A. from Washington University and also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has been included in several group and solo exhibitions locally and regionally, including a Challenge Exhibition at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial and the Biennial '91 at the Delaware Art Museum, and exhibitions at Thread Waxing Space in New York, Larry Becker, Vox Populi, Momenta Art Alternatives, Levy Gallery for the Arts in Philadelphia at Moore College of Art and Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Beaver College Art Gallery. Mr. Marti's work is included in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Fabric Workshop. He is currently a master printer and the apprentice coordinator at The Fabric Workshop.