…Might Be Good
Review of Seth Alverson: Ghost Survivor of the Final Plague
By Riley O’Bryan
January 26, 2007 http://www.fluentcollab.org/mbg/issue82.htm
The press release found on Art Palace’s website, authored by Seth Alverson, highlights the more important aspects of his mythical growth from an infant raised in a cave by blood and fire to a mature wizard-artist who subsists on the breath of wolves and the breast milk of his thirteen wives. This mythology does not stop at the press office however, but follows through into the real world of his art, where he presides as a Creator who threatens to “bend the universe into a tail-eating serpent; where fire will cook fire until the least fixed thing will penetrate all things and all future events will be indistinguishable from the worst that time has to offer”. From the looks Ghost Survivor of the Final Plague, it may have already happened.
Upon entering the gallery, a startling painting at least double the size of most of his other drawings, begins the Ghost’s apocalyptic, world-bending narrative. A destructive force has demolished the home, revealing the mountain top of a very possible prehistoric landscape living just beyond the rubble. The two people inside appear dead, one’s face buried in the floor boards, the other limp in an antique chair. On the other side of the room, directly opposite Return of Prehistory, a giant wooly mammoth has demolished an entire town. It shows no signs of distress in The New Ouroboros, despite the war still ensnared in its beautiful hair. Alverson leaves no clear clues as to whether or not he employed this mammoth as his physical agent of world-bending, but it certainly caused a lot of damage.
The red waters in The Sea Beneath a Sky of Coffins is the Ballast for Evolution, part 1 and 2, crash against rocks under a sky clouded by “ghosts of ontology” and provide a baleful living-space for tusked creatures who resemble giant squids almost as much as mammoths and serve as a painful reminder of the creator’s scorn. In Plague of Constant Recurrence, Alverson finds his lone human agent, a wondering swordsmen whose stolid countenance never evolved, contemplating the waters of cruel evolution. Foundering under the immense pressure of moral exigencies in times of mortal crisis, he snapped, killing everyone around in The Plateau of Fertility, leaving brains to leak out of fallen helmets. Among the murdered bodies, he ravages a woman, squeezing her huge, milky breast while she claws at his braided hair. We can’t see her face or his chest, their hair covers any giveaways of differentiation. Never has a breast reminded me so much of a penis.
Hanging one drawing away, Plateau of Futility gives us a menagerie of prehistoric beasts copulating in poses that wouldn’t be out of place in an elementary science text, were they pictured alone instead of copulating. Each beast is identical to the partner in its respective species and underpins the serpent-eating-its-tail, world-bending quality of Alverson’s plague.
Despair resonates throughout the blight of Ghost in all creatures save the proud Pterodactyl, the only character who delivers any proof of positive reproduction. Perched on a gnarled tree branch in Coincidence, the pterodactyl watches over his eggs. Below him, a dumbstruck mammoth waits below with mangled tusks and a sacrificial goat sulks patiently in the background. The pterodactyl is the first creature we see after the destruction in Return to Prehistory. Perhaps his constancy should offer hope during the time of plague. But, it might just be a coincidence.
Don’t miss the Goat Whores in the other room!