Wring Your Hands, Sing the End!
...is the first installment of the series Apocalyptic Bedtime Stories for Children. Each short book explores the concept of the end of days in a narrative assembled from appropriated images.
Beginning with the ominous you are convinced the time is coming Martin makes a departure from the personal nature of her previous work; the subject is no longer herself, but the viewer. The book itself moves like a quickly-cut slide show between its softcover frame. Increasingly tense imagery stimulates a dark expectation, seemingly one belonging to the collective unconscious.
Some photographs, out of context, would appear unassuming, entirely vernacular in nature. When sequenced with insidiously disturbing illustrations these snapshots take on an eerie quality. With images of children, vaccination, birds, and airplanes Martin elicits in this volume our dread of infection, plagues, of chaos and uncertainty.
Apocalyptic Bedtime Stories is a series concerned with adult manifestations of childhood fears, and the shapes they assume. Wring Your Hands, Sing the End! is a nightmare pastiche of every pandemic scenario assimilated into the subconscious, it is the fear we share.
Beginning with the ominous you are convinced the time is coming Martin makes a departure from the personal nature of her previous work; the subject is no longer herself, but the viewer. The book itself moves like a quickly-cut slide show between its softcover frame. Increasingly tense imagery stimulates a dark expectation, seemingly one belonging to the collective unconscious.
Some photographs, out of context, would appear unassuming, entirely vernacular in nature. When sequenced with insidiously disturbing illustrations these snapshots take on an eerie quality. With images of children, vaccination, birds, and airplanes Martin elicits in this volume our dread of infection, plagues, of chaos and uncertainty.
Apocalyptic Bedtime Stories is a series concerned with adult manifestations of childhood fears, and the shapes they assume. Wring Your Hands, Sing the End! is a nightmare pastiche of every pandemic scenario assimilated into the subconscious, it is the fear we share.
