The land rushed at him, a tidal wave.  He was crushed by darkness and the look of the country and the million odours on a wind that iced his body.  He fell back under the breaking curve of darkness and sound and smell, his ears roaring.  He whirled.  The stars poured over his sight like flaming meteors…He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land.  He was not empty.  There was more than enough here to fill him.  There would always be more than enough.
        Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.
    Cormac McCarthy    Blood Meridian

Look up.  In our history we have foretold countless dooms tumbling from the heavens intending to compress us into oblivion.  Technology, an evolving imagination and developing database of tales have amplified the quantity of real and imagined threats by several magnitudes.  We have survived Y2K, SARS, AIDS, West Nile Virus, the Tech Crash, the predictions of Nostradamus, Iraq 1 and Iraq 2, all of which were touted to foretell annihilation.  Despite our demonstrated invulnerability we continue to fear and anticipate the worst.

This exhibition documents the illusory nature of the theoretical construct of the modern world, a critical, sympathetic and acidic perspective on human activity.  Bad Weather is a Chicken Little complex in which we make too much of our condition.  We are far more threatening to ourselves than any monster, natural or otherwise, yet we obsess over storms and aliens, angels and surveillance from above.  We are aware of the possibility of killer meteors and other near earth objects, untraceable government satellites, and the menaces of climate change dropping monstrous hail and deadly cyclones from sheets of black cloud.  We are desperate in our engagement with searching for these possible threats, inventing mythologies and machines that infiltrate the darkness with shafts of light to worn us of impending doom.  In doing so we illuminate objects hidden and imagined so that we cast shadows of doubt,  silhouettes on cave walls and canvasses.  It is lovely that we need these things to scare us so that we feel more profoundly.  We have accepted the lost ideal of utopia but are moving ahead anyway.

The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
Cormac McCarthy    Blood Meridian

This show responds to the longing, the defeat, the yearning, and the inevitability of our desire to continue despite the lost promise of utopia.  We are alive and free of this utopian pied piper lure towards false hope.  Perhaps it is something we did not need at all.  What more might we rid ourselves of and become more honest for the effort?

So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.
Cormac McCarthy    The Crossing

It is emboldening that we continue.  The world, our future, our lives – a perpetuated machination building off one mistake towards the next with no end in sight.

Until he has become fully human, until he learns to conduct himself as a member of the earth, he will continue to create gods who will destroy him.   
Henry Miller        The Colossus of Maroussi

These paintings take stalk of the skeleton of current reality.  They are the recordings of both an attempt to make peace with what we have, and, by not pushing away so abruptly that they loose track of us, acquire a longer view, out over the horizon, and in looking back anticipate our future. 

She smiled. I think it's just the snow. I think it makes people stop and think.
Bell nodded. I hope it comes a blizzard then.
Cormac McCarthy     No Country for Old Men