Buildings collapse. Bridges buckle. Steel, concrete, and brick twist and slide into piles of rubble. It is impossible to prepare for disaster on an epic scale, only for recovery. Apocalypse Management (telling about being one being living) is the first section of a planned series of five animations based on Hudson River painter Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire. The series grows out of my longtime interest in that cycle of paintings, the panoramic landscapes of Hans Memmling as well as Last Judgment altarpieces of the renaissance.

The projected landscape depicts the aftermath, a constant looped state of digging out. The particular cause of the devastation is unclear, but whether natural disaster, act of war, or environmental nightmare, the scenario of wreckage portends a state of emergency for which we are reminded to be ready. The figures in the animation are each lost in the moment when disaster ends and the processes of grieving and rebuilding begin.