“An Accelerating Decline” takes the viewer on a strange journey through city and country, floating through a landscape fraught with apocalyptic messages: fire and water, flames and waves.
The title is taken from a graph depicting the fall of the housing market, but it becomes a metaphor for the state of our environment, and the threats therein. Woven into the imagery is footage from last summer when British Petroleum oil was spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, all of it visible via the Scandi Rov 1 “live feed” being broadcast on the internet. I filmed it from the screen of my computer.
Also I merge a self-portrait series with my drawings of buffalo and wolves, pointing to the fact that not only do humans lose in our current environmental crisis, but creatures do also. The animals seem to stare out of the chaos, entreating us to pay attention.
The imagery comes from my artwork, photography and film manipulated in Photoshop and After Effects, and the music and sound from Garageband using a kind of abstract layering of sounds and notes. The lyric “I heard it last night when I was talking in my sleep” comes from the Buffali song “Beth Dances the Tango” written and sung by my son Andrew Yonda.
