Bradley Chriss

The myth of modern humanity is an absence of myth, and with that extinction has dissolved into a series of facts about asteroids, super volcanoes, global climate change, super novas, and nuclear war, but a secret anxiety of extinction still hovers over everyone. This anxiety needs an additional outlet, and I hope to provide a small part of that outlet, by transforming extinction as an event into a simulacra of a myth. If extinction can be given a face (even just a mask) then we can make a mirror out of it, and we can start to see some characteristics of extinction. And as we scan the surface of our extinction mirrors, maybe we can start to understand on a more profound level the possibility of a secret desire to be the ones who see it, who see the ending of it all. The final act will be to see if we can see past the extinction, finding something that looks nothing like us, while the hum of what we've just seen still vibrates in our minds (changing our face), and maybe then we can really begin to see who we are. (Maybe even see ourselves?)

Humanity has attempted and is attempting to come to terms with its inevitable extinction. From seas boiling and rivers filled with blood, to a wolf swallowing earth, as lotus blossoms containing everything open and close in instants that last billions of years. By using an intimate scale and saturated color to seduce viewers I want to bring them into the ultimate conflict of power and control that humanity has with their own environment. I am not aiming for allegory, just the void. I am hoping to give extinction a form that builds the paradoxical space of where the totality of human consciousness has dropped into the void. I am trying to push the sentimental against the nightmarish, heightening both feelings within the viewer and revealing the quiet feeling of conflict itself.

How can we imagine anything that comes after us?

More importantly: Can we imagine anything coming after us as anything but monstrous?