“Last Resort: KELLY o’connor”

Because any fan of the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller has a romantic hold on the shape of a geodesic dome, San Antonio artist Kelly O’Connor decided she’d take it one step further and make one.

For people interested in the visions of early modern America, the image of a dome is one of those touchstones, like space flight and Frank Lloyd Wright, that gave Americans the idea that the future had arrived — and that they were actually living in it.

O’Connor was living it, too, on family vacations to places like Disney’s Epcot theme park and Yellowstone National Park. And her new show at Women and Their Work, called “Last Resort,” is a doubleentendre that revisits and reimagines these vacation spots that, in this decade, seem impossibly quaint.

“All these places are places we went on family vacation,” O’Connor says, walking through her exhibit. But, as the only artist in a family of four accountants, she has a very different way of looking at these images.

One work, a public swimming pool her family visited, has had its baby blue concrete replaced

10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays through May 9

Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca St.

Free

www. womenandtheirwork.org with the image of a deep cave, gaping up at swimmers through the water, like a genuinely scary Balmorhea or Barton Springs.

“I was a lifeguard,” O’Connor says. “I would just stare at the bottom, at the tile.”

In all of the works there are collages of multicolored hexagons, sprinkled over a scene, or peering from a crater in bubbling Yellowstone pools.

“They’re almost like hypnotic,” O’Connor says.

Then there’s the geodesic dome. It’s seen better days — there are holes in the roof, and wasp nests hanging inside. But even the wasp nests hint at a former glory — they’re gilded and flecked with colorful, jewelled nodes.

“I was trying to have that ruin-like feel,” O’Connor says.

The country in these images was different, she says. “At that point we were really looking at our future, and really hopeful about our future.”

Now we’re focused more on decline. And her images follow suit.

A warehouse that covers the once-famous Hot Wells bath house in San Antonio (which, O’Connor says, is now dilapidated) is remade with fragments of color. “All these movie stars used to visit it,” she says. But it burned down twice.

“I like the dark juxtaposed with happiness,” she says. She used that idea to create what she calls, a sort of “abandoned civilization that pre-existed.”

The scene in “Monorail” is of the wreckage of the monorail at Hemisfair ’68, that year’s World’s Fair. Police and worried onlookers crowd around the train that simply bolted from the elevated track. “I didn’t realize that a place like that existed in my own backyard at one time,” says O’Connor.

The wreckage is optimistically sprinkled with starbursts of colors, which O’Connor takes from old record covers and other objects of the era. It’s probably the work that does the most obvious job of covering up the inadequacies of this unsustainable futuristic-past.

Judy Garland has a habit of popping up in O’Connor’s vision — she’s waving happily from the edge of that multicolored Yellowstone crater.

In “Snap!” Garland has her hands raised, almost comically. She’s in black and white, but coated with a perimeter of gold glitter.

For O’Connor, Garland is one of those American icons who carry a lot of symbolism.

It was a time when “people were a lot more unaware of this kind of baggage,” she says.

Whether that’s entirely true or not — when we look at images of this era, we think of all the things these people don’t know yet. Maybe the past will always seem simpler, no matter what happens.