Eleanor Antin

The Last Days of Pompeii
16April - 12 June, 2004

" Pompeii, with its grand murals, flourishing gardens, excavated relics of everyday life, and ash covered corpses has haunted western culture since its discovery over 300 years ago. The images of the flourishing Roman town living the good life on the brink of annihilation has always suggested uncomfortable parallels with the contemporary world, where the sunlit world turns out to have dark shadows in which cruelty, pain, and death lurk at the edge of conciousness. Its easy to see the connection to the affluent beach towns hugging the turbulent earth and slippery coast of my own Southern California. And part of the facination is Rome itself, the great empire that owned and then lost the world. Every century has reinvented her in the light of its own desires, fears and lies. Seeing it through a scrim of 19th century salon painting (Alma-Taddema, Lord Leighton, Puvis de Chavannes) that I am recreating as a set of large color photographs of my own images, I am excavating a Pompeii of my own invention in which beautiful, afluent people live the good life, innocent of the disasters waiting just around the corner. "

-Eleanor Antin, August 2001