magsea

Austin seems to be hovering in some sort of world weariness these days. Between the severed, sashimi-like tongues at Okay Mountain’s “Dark Matter: New Work from Japan” and the mutant, calamitous sea of malice and mammoths at Art Palace, the state of art in Central Texas looks sadistically mirthful. Seth Alverson delivers a concentration of drawings and paintings entitled “Ghost Survivor of the Final Plague.”

A future of natural corruption and mutation provides fetid ground to rake and Alverson digs up some seriously disturbing creatures. Wizards become culpable for cuckold interludes amidst ruins and dismembered limbs. Tusks of woolly mammoths clone and choke themselves in a soft torsion disconnected from the animal itself. Each drawing portrays a mental geographic minefield where we are witnessing or nearly missing catastrophic events until all that’s left is a coagulating mess. Alverson’s propinquity for such malevolence resonates in all the complicated, repetitious and somewhat sociopathic lines he draws over and over until they become vibrant red seas and azuline, undulating surfaces. These uncharted waters smother teleology; consequently opening prehistoric possibilities and submerging any inkling of a heavenly dead end. Somehow the tenuous modern landscape shifts beneath us and the ground Alverson covers is absolutely treacherous, consuming and the curious manifestation of mal du siecle with a Quarternarian’s providence.

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You can witness the darkness if you stop by Art Palace before the show ends Feb. 17th.

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