Gean Moreno, November 2012

"The ten projects selected for The End oscillate between desolate landscapes quietly palpitating with strange potentials to new monuments that have arisen from ruined worlds.

Bianco Salvo’s photograph of a possible fossil is all the more disquieting for its almost clinical presentation. It is unclear what kind of extinction it is registering and who the audience for it really is. The image may just belong to a future exhibition which, rather that think us as its audience, takes us as a long extinct subject.

Roberto Rovetta’s furniture stands strangely between material realities--part bound to the geometries of modernist design and part quasi-organic and potentially proliferating mineral pattern. It straddles rigid borders. Shown alone, a forlorn object becoming slowly animated, one wonders who exactly this object is for. It may not be for us.

Matteo Girola “dead-end” photos are strangely difficult to locate temporally. Just as they’ve been culled from Goggle Earth, they could as well have been culled from the future, from some post-human moment in which our bodies may no longer be around but our images will continue to circulate, as disembodied data.

NastyNasty also plays at a confusion of time signatures--the frozen time of the picture and the strange and ghostly movement of the reflection. It’s almost as if the memory of movement --our our mobility--may go on living in the still imagery that we will leave behind after we are gone.

Moria Lahis introduces a much more melancholic tone. She looks back nostalgically at a moment in which the last human bodies moved in the deserts that the apocalypse ushered in. That her image, in some way, calls up Nico’s Desertshore album shouldn’t be lost on us.  

Alec von Bergen presents the architectural and object remnants in a ghost world. The artifacts he presents, lost in a milky atmospheres, are imbued with an ambiguous quality--they may belong to our world, but they may also belong to a world from which we have been eradicated.  

Rosario Leotta infuses a Gothic current into thoughts of the end. She mines the perspectives and tonalities of a Poe-an point of view to remind us that the end should always be spooky, as it invariably calls the dead to return and take a last stand.

Michael Cheung zooms out from the landscape. He gives us the entire planet cut with black furrows and grain knots, free of all the color schemes and amorphous forms that once signaled vitality and life. Not only this, but he floats the planet in the cold black of dead space.

Virginia Lee’s paintings think the end as something that has already taken place. Rather than focus directly on our end, she excavates the sites of other ends, of lifeworlds that may have vanished and of which we, now that our end looms large, are beginning to want to understand.

OqLeBarron raises the monuments of the post-apocalypse. Leaving behind the tried languages of art, OqLeBarron mines the seemingly more fertile vocabularies of game design and popular culture. In his work, the ghouls of past are recoded as the population of the future and the black sun of the apocalypse returns as the scorching sky-wound of future empires."