Apocalyptic Tendencies, 2023
“Envisaging an apocalypse is how we express our fears about change and uncertainty.”
Apocalyptic Tendencies addresses the ultimate challenge we face; the end of humanity, and our morbid fascination with the idea of the apocalypse. Through the visual language of color and humor I seek to make the topic accessible and even interactive. Since I was young I found interest in apocalyptic and dystopian literature, movies, and video games. Taking in this content often led my imagination to wondering what the actual fate of humanity may be. The root of this interest surrounding the end of humanity is how I relate to it as an individual.
In an age of major technological advances and easily accessible and distributable information, people are faced with an onslaught of information and news on a daily basis; lately it seems most of it is bad news. Amidst this distress I feel a spectrum of emotion ranging from dread and despair to almost excitement to visually explore our potential demise. I inject my personal brand of humor, personal anecdote, and current events into the work to create a maximalist vision of a very bad day on planet earth. Riffing off of religious ideologies and my own Christian upbringing, I also add biblical symbols of the Apocalypse to juxtapose our reality on earth and topics such as climate change that may cause the ‘apocalypse’. There are a multitude of overlapping narratives and ‘easter eggs’ to find within the work.
This work is accompanied by a satirical newspaper entitled The End Times. Physical copies are available upon request. A PDF of the body of the newspaper is linked below:
If you are interested in reading more about the apocalypse, my thesis paper is available in PDF format.
