As a sub-genre of action movies and literature, apocalypse porn has made a name for itself in recent years. Discounting what we typically look for in movies, story becomes secondary and characters’ interaction is merely filler for the money shots of Tokyo being trampled by a giant monster or Los Angeles falling into a great chasm. LOST, a solid summer group show at Invisible-Exports, explores our fascination and obsession with the End.
Organized by Amy Smith-Stewart as part of Smith-Stewart Gallery’s “roving curatorial project,” LOST packs a lot into the Lower East Side gallery’s small space, without making it feel crowded. Almost entirely devoid of human figures, the exhibition centers around an abandoned world of barren landscapes and the remnants of civilization.
Lost exhibit at Invisible-Exports
Yamini Nayar’s two photographs, “Strange Event” and “Cleo,” beg to explain their backstories. Nayar builds the sets for her photographs in her Brooklyn studio, giving them a tight and interior feel: the awkward quarters of a post-apocalyptic safe space. In “Cleo,” the black wooden floor of a cramped room is partly torn away, revealing the rotting space beneath. The picture is strange and angled, with an eye peering through a chink in the opposite wall.
If Nayar’s analog images envision a future of closed-off space amid destruction, then Leah Beeferman’s graphite and laser-etched works indicate a machine-obsessed world where detail and exactness are paramount. Unexplained graphs and squared-off shapes share space in these graphic representations of geometrical obsession and time keeping.
LOST definitely takes the high road of apocalyptic media, tending toward the conceptual rather than the graphic and chaotic imagination, but the underlying fascination with a post-human world carries through as a common thread. People like Harold Camping and Stephen King keep the threat of apocalypse fresh in our minds, but why are we drawn to the prospect of our collective demise? LOST does little to answer the question, but proposes some futures toward which we may be heading.
Through July 30, Invisible-Exports, 14A Orchard St., www.invisible-exports.com.
