Shadowboxing the Apocalypse

Unless you’re heavily medicated or hopelessly self-absorbed, you are surely aware that things seem to be going terribly awry.

California continues to blaze while crude oil spills into the Black Sea. Western North Carolina has barely begun to recover since Hurricane Helene swept off mountaintops and wiped out entire towns. The historical revision of America nears completion as regulatory oversight on deep-pocketed polluters expires sooner than the milk in your fridge.

It’s tempting—and wholly appropriate—to feel powerless as we witness concurrent disasters of what appear to be biblical proportions. I’m usually the first one to hearken that the End Times be nigh and that we’ve all got one-way tickets to wherever this collective handbasket is heading.

But maybe not just yet.

While the catastrophes keep coming and grief and loss pierce the lives of loved ones near and far, it doesn’t mean humanity is completely cooked. We may be shit at things like fair sharing of resources and making a decent printer, but we do know how to adapt. Our ancestors somehow managed to survive ice ages and plagues and horrendous political regimes, and they didn’t even have rechargeable handwarmers.

Sure, free markets and mass consumption will forever be an unsustainable scourge on the planet, but so far we’re all still here—for now, anyway. There might be enough time to wrest this whole scene around, or at least leave helpful commentary for whomever or whatever comes next.

This sort of dark optimism can stave off despair as well as fuel innovation and purpose, as attested by SCAD professors and fellow Armageddon obsessors Matt Toole and Ryan Madson.

“I have my opinions about politics and the direction the world is going, but that doesn’t get us anywhere. So I make art,” says Toole, the masterful metallurgist responsible for elegant iron sculpture work around town and outside his studio at Old Roberd’s Dairy, where he keeps an admirable array of blowtorches.

“I put the angst into the work. That helps sustain me, if not physically, then spiritually—it helps me exorcise the demons.”

Madson, who teaches urban planning and architecture with a lens on global disparities and emerging ecologies, posits that while the way we live cannot go on indefinitely, the “slow burn” of our demise will concur with the rise of new capabilities and consciousness as the era of human domination wanes.

“I think we’re in the early phases of societal collapse, unevenly distributed, with some pockets lasting longer than others,” he speculates.

“I prefer to focus on the non-humans that will be inheriting the earth, whether they’re birds or marine life or super intelligent spiders. Maybe they’ll have a better chance at doing something different.”

Inspired by long evenings staring into the abyss and an even longer friendship (turns out they’re also distant cousins, but aren’t we all?), this pensive pair recently addressed their revelatory musings in a colorful collaboration, Pop-Cycled Apocalypse: In the Garden of Earthly Detritus.

Occupying the Drive Thru Art Box behind Green Truck Pub for the last several months, the project utilized materials culled from Matt’s studio and scraped off the street to fill three panels with all manner of consumer cast-offs and nature’s rubble:

Plastic PEZ dispensers elevated on tiny pedestals, cicadas bathed in neon and Spanish moss, a smashed bearded dragon bejeweled like a sacred relic.

Further ironic delight could be found in a crystal ball—tellingly opaque—and a black-and-white print of Ossabaw Island by heralded photographer John Earl from the 1970s, unearthed from a dusty box somewhere and recognized with surprise by ARTS Southeast co-founder and John’s daughter, Emily Earl.

Panel 1: 1970s Ossabaw meets 2025. Photo by Emily Earl

The shadowboxes pulsed with red, blue, and green backlighting, evoking the tenebrous glow of a Blade Runner strip joint while speaking explicitly to coastal Georgia’s fragile environs. Housed in a former fast-food menu, the trash-as-treasure display encapsulated the complexity and contradiction of modern life—with a vigorous nod to Hieronymus Bosch, whose own 15th-century triptych depicting the orgy of human folly continues to fascinate and repulse.

If Hieronymus Bosch collected roadkill? Photo by Grace Lawson

You may have noticed I’m using the past tense. The installation came down last week to make way for the next ARTS Southeast public art genius, and befitting the subject matter, everyone showed up for the end.

Yet in spite of impending doom, the mood amongst Savannah’s art lovers and community supporters remained buoyant. About 30 of us cheerfully clustered in the chilly evening to hear the collaborators close out the project, one of Toole’s metal torches sending out flames and heat like the triumph of Prometheus.

In attendance were Drive Thru Art Box alumni Mr. Hop the Scissor (aka the Chris Moss) and electronic alchemist Will Penny, whose creative hacking of a Big Mouth Billy Bass gave passersby a taste of future AI overlords.

Also gloriously present from the local environmentally interactive artistry roster: Katherine Sandoz, whose abstract renderings of flora reflect unmatched intimate depth; that adorable absurdist Rubi McGrory, who always finds the beauty and really can make art out of anything, and native plant apostle Lisa D. Watson, continuing to “naturalize our surroundings” with new works at Thunderbolt’s Ology Gallery, opening Feb. 1.

As more news filtered in of the Pacific Palisades fires, the art box contributors—who I’ve come to think of as the Apocalypse Cousins—admitted they believe that civilization as we know it may well be toast. Our only recourse is “Time Machine Logic”; i.e. changing our past mistakes to arrive at an alternate future. “Unfortunately,” they acknowledge in their artist statement, this “can only be accomplished through art or fiction.”

This makes their work and that like it ever more important, since “without the possibilities contained in art we would be consigned to a closed field of hopelessness, abjectivity, and darkness.”

That didn’t faze this crowd of rowdy creatives, used to depressing paradoxes and sifting through chaos to find meaning. Acquiescing to worldwide strife has been a theme for a thousand generations—then again, so has unfounded optimism and irrational hope. Being able to ponder it all is what makes us human.

This seemed personified by Madson, who while talking about the imminent end of the world, as Rubi noted later, was holding his young daughter’s plastic Frozen lunchbox the entire time.

So there it is. We’re smart, silly creatures who love babies and cheeseburgers and shiny new things delivered to our door, and we’re unlikely to give up our bad habits any time soon, even as the consequences roil all around us.

Rather than let this corrode our precious lives and loves, let us activate our compassion for ourselves and each other. We can’t change the past, and who knows where adaptation will take us. Maybe the AI bots and smart spiders will fix it all.

In the meantime, we’ve got to take care of who needs help now, and do our best to curb our appetites for those who follow.

Even if we’re all advancing upon some inevitable end, we’re still here, together, warming our toes on its slow burn.

The shadowdance, it never ends, never ends ~ JLL

The Apocalypse Cousins. Photo by Emily Earl