Jerry Saltz at Vulture:
Abigail Goldman’s micro-renderings of scenes of carnage, created at 1:87 scale, are a testament to the pull of the small, especially at a time when art is getting bigger and more elaborately produced. In one tableau that could have come out of Breaking Bad, a shipping storage container in a gravel field contains a bloody corpse and a woman with her hands up as two gunmen nearby take aim. Another features a powder-blue van in a desert and two men warming their hands over an oil-drum fire, a mutilated corpse splayed between them. A third features a machine-gun-toting Queen Elizabeth and her two corgis standing over a dead man. Behind her, the paintings, the china in the cabinet, the upholstered chairs, the patterned wallpaper — all are perfect.
Goldman calls her works “Die-o-ramas.” I call them a cross between nightmares, documentary, and horror. In her day job, she is an investigator for a public defender outside Seattle, researching horrendous incidents of death, murder, and suicide.
more here.
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When history is about to take an abrupt turn, is there something in people’s eyes or in their secret longings that pre-announces it somehow—and that minds of a particular cast (poets and visionaries or perhaps psychiatrists) can read clearly and even put into words? If the world were to end next year, who would know about it today, and how? When we look back on the past, we say sometimes that there were “clear signs” that this or that event would happen, that the “writing was on the wall.” But how many of these signs were really there, and how many are projected back by hindsight? The problem is of special importance to historians. How can the historian single out a past event, focus on it exclusively, and pretend not to know what came after? How can a scholar fake ignorance?
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In the
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