Also borrowing from religious narratives, Tori Benz’s Apocalypse studies are a series of drawings which engage the notion of ‘personal’ apocalypse, an intimate space pregnant with insomniac imaginings. In each drawing Benz has applied delicate layers of graphite to a smooth gesso board the colour of bone, rubbing back into the soft tones and shadows. The twelve panels form a story board narrative evocative of a graphic novel without words. In this series Benz draws on imagery from the biblical Apocalypse of John, known as the Book of Revelation. Benz narrative flirts with the utopian implications of the apolcalpyse -the new order that it heralds-while swarming with more sinister imagery; locusts, ravenous dogs and prone bodies swim in and out of visibility, suggesting the unfolding chaos of apocalypse. The studies narrate apprehensive time of pre-apocalypse. A gathering swarm of locusts encroaches into the intimate space of sleeping couple attached over by dogs. In the half light of the bedroom, the dogs waver between their wild and domesticated states, appearing protective or threatening at turns. As the couple rolls in and out of waking, their dreaming lives intrude into the shadowed room in which they lie. The woman’s growing belly signals that the time is near.

The locust and dog motifs reflect Benz’s interest in the history of humanities relationship with animals and the symbolic meanings that we attach to them. The locusts are a direct reference to John’s prophesied plagues in Revelation. Over the panel of Apocalypse study (locustidae) no 1-3, the locusts appear to break through the fabric of daily life from some other realm. As a growing multitude, they pose an unknown threat to the gathered family unit in (locustidae) no 1, perhaps an omen of things to come. The panels which form Apocalypse study no 1-9 may take place several years after the locust plague, or perhaps they exist within the same time; the waking inverse world to the dream space of the locusts. In the smeared shadows of the couple’s bedroom, a pack of dogs lingers bedside the prostrate bodies. Benz draws on a cultural history in which dogs have often been associated with the link between the world of the living and the dead. The Egyptian jackal - headed god Cerberus, who guarded the threshold to the the Greek underworld, are two examples of an almost global history of the association of dogs with the passage from life to death, in which they range from faithful guides for the dead to scavenging creatures which feast on carrion and even judge the souls of the deceased. Benz’s dogs , unobserved by their human companions, shift within this ambient state betwen domestication and wildness. The connotations are integral to Bens’s personal symbology of apocalypse, reduced to human scale, where death and new life coexist, where extinction take place within a cycle of renewal, and where the wide scale disaster prophesied by John is embedded within the utopian promise of a new world.

Theo Constantino The end. p 4-5

Curated by Theo Constantino.