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"Signs of the Apocalypse/Rapture"
Remember when we had a good laugh over our misplaced Y2K anxieties? Maybe the memory’s been erased by the 2000 election and the terrorist attacks, wars, tsunami, hurricanes and recession that followed. In 2008, as we scanned the sky for a rain of frogs, Chicago-based Front Forty Press published Signs of the Apocalypse/Rapture, a gorgeous book of art, essays and music evoking end-of-the-world gloom—and the joy of new beginnings.
The book has inspired an eponymous exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC). Curated by Front Forty Press founder and director Doug Fogelson, the sprawling multimedia show includes many of the same artists and benefits from an expansive installation that gives its large-scale works room to breathe, and a listening station equipped with the music from Front Forty’s book, which puts visitors in just the right nihilistic or dreamy mood.
Surprisingly few pieces point to religion—and even their references are oblique and open-ended. In Mormon-raised Ricky Allman’s painting Apocalyzer (2007), an abstract construction is blasted by fire and spun around by unseen forces. The title of Andrew Schoultz’s mixed-media painting Running with Chaos, Nature, War & Power (2007) name-checks one of the Four Horsemen; the intricately rendered red and blue warhorses charging across the painting bring the other three to mind. They’re surrounded by pyramids and eyes that resemble the dollar bill’s conspiracy theory–fueling symbols, and a flurry of arrows directed by men sitting on prayer rugs.
Schoultz depicts this seeming holy war in the style of an Indian miniature executed by Hieronymus Bosch and a studio of stoners—tweaking the scale of his figures beyond realism and inserting floating tree stumps and smoke-belching brick factories that out-weird the Book of Revelation. The artist’s incredible draftsmanship and ability to balance tiny details with the grand sweep of the whole make Running with Chaos… one of the best pieces in the exhibition.
Several artists imply we have only ourselves to blame for our impending doom. Environmental catastrophe shadows Lora Fosberg’s Nevermind (2008), a patchwork of the artist’s illustrations and pieces of found paper. Her lovely but heartbreaking images of severed tree branches saying “IT HURTS” and birds perching on trash are hard to confront—particularly if Fosberg forces you to connect the dots between her tragic tableau and your addiction to printed matter. Richard Misrach’s photograph Swamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana (1998, printed 2001) employs a more polished aesthetic to equally unsettling ends. The rusty pipe transecting the picture has the same brown tinge as the barren trees protruding from the sick-looking, pale-green swamp: Nature’s already fatally entwined with toxic industry.
Though we don’t subscribe to Left Behind’s interpretation of “rapture,” we believe including so many retrograde figurative works in the show’s second category constitutes a sin. A typical example is John Pranica’s Autumn (2007), a huge oil painting of a nude couple making love in midair, high above lush farmland—with a plate full of fruit hovering next to them. We can’t fault the artist’s racy subject, however: As Fogelson writes in the exhibition’s introductory essay, rapture is often associated with orgasm—or ice cream. Alison Ruttan’s 2001 photomontage Praline Surprise makes the case for both.
“Signs of the Apocalypse/Rapture” smoothly conveys the multiplicity of perspectives on its two subjects. But shouldn’t it have more work by artists from outside the U.S. and Europe—and some speculation on the outcome of a Cubs World Series win?
