At which point in the life cycle does beauty mutate to decay; often horrible things have their own kind of beauty. In the imbricated landscape of contemporary culture, a created and porous definition of war, conflict, and manifestations of violence has emerged. Sometimes, They Have To Kill Us is an examination of humanity in this age of conflict; a conflict between ‘us’ and ‘the stranger’.  In this scenario – this exhibition aims to redress ‘us’ as a collective stand in for humanity, and ‘the stranger’ as colonizing forces that seek to pervert and subvert the natural order of the earth, and as such, undermine the intention of humanity.

 

This exhibition will be a solo show of American artist, Andrew Erdos. Erdos has, for many years, been fascinated with this idea of beauty in the decay of environments, and the liminal reality of that notion. Erdos work featured in Sometimes, They Have To Kill Us, will be a combination of new and existing work, dealing with the idea of out of body experience, breakdowns of linear time, and the travel of a soul.

 

Fossil fuels are the reincarnated energy of prehistoric life. They have been the catalyst for a dramatic human evolution and the conclusion of the Holocene Epoch. Erdos work often involves beautiful, colorful images that are abstracted and oblique from direct reading of narrative, but allude to the devastation of natural worlds, and foreshadow an end of nature.

In his work he creates visually beautiful and ephemeral moments, aligning forces and future promises. Erdos often creates work that serves allegorical lens through which humanities’ dependence on oil is refracted. Illuminating the wondrous bounty and innovation that fossil fuels have allowed humanity to achieve, which concurrently and adversely has created systemic manifestations of environmental and social violence, as well as environmental racism. It is the acknowledgment of a reality in which humanity has othered itself from the earth in an acceptance and embracing of prosperity. 

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Photograph by Andrew Erdos