the once and future king
A working-title-that-will-likely-stick for this new series-in-progress. Here’s a snippet from the artist statement, also in development:
Referencing T.H. White’s portrayal of Merlin as a being who experiences time backwards to normal reality, “The Once And Future King” serves as working-title for a large body of work documenting a series of strange, seemingly unconnected events whose causal mechanisms exist outside of normal time and space. While we are privileged to the ‘effects’ described by these events – the disappearance of a student from an abandoned Jeep, a garage where some monstrous Lovecraftian terror emerged and was summarily dispatched, a paradox of a time-travelling book – the ‘cause’ of these events seems entirely unknowable. The events themselves play across a fictional timeline, punctuated by a system of signifiers drawn from actual reality and historical reference.
Playing with the compression of time on a narrative scale, characters stand in the moment, posing, proud, as if in foreknowledge of the future-historical significance of their present context, a hypothetical “spark event” for a cataclysm yet to come. The prophetic mode here references, inversely, the truism “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”; within these narratives, history has already predetermined a far-flung future disaster, and while the immediate causal mechanisms of these seemingly random events is unknowable, the certainty of their eventual impact becomes quite monstrous.
Works in the series will be printed fairly large, around 60″x90″, and possibly mounted on lightboxes. The composite images possess an elaborate amount of detail, and will ideally have an “enhanced” reading when viewed up close. Details are provided below.
The Dismemberment of a Shoggoth (The Once and Future King)
Detail - The Dismemberment of a Shoggoth (The Once and Future King)
Detail - The Dismemberment of a Shoggoth (The Once and Future King)
Detail - The Dismemberment of a Shoggoth (The Once and Future King)
Detail - The Dismemberment of a Shoggoth (The Once and Future King)
