In 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote his essay “The End of History” in which he argues for the view of history as a positivist evolution with its acme distilling into western liberalism. Fukuyama’s worldview, that of the unipolar world as an inevitable pinnacle of human achievement, marries neoliberalism and Christian eschatology and has provided an unintentionally nihilistic roadmap for the world forty years after its publication. The blinkered focus of growth and progress ignores many problems caused by the success of capitalism and neoliberal policies, specifically exploitation of the global working class and the immanentization of climate collapse.

This body of work uses the language of horticulture, 90s science fiction, and neoclassical formalism to grapple with my own anxieties around this secular eschatology. Using traditional woodworking methods, digital fabrication, found objects with video, I created a series of objects that attempt to collapse time, a personal push-back against the violence of positivism and endless expansion.

Many of these sculptures source images from 90s anime and Kaiju films. I’m enamored with the design of these giant robots and creatures and am both interested in and skeptical of this genre of science fiction, where incredible levels of technology, global and interstellar economic and political systems are all easily reduced to combat between giant robots. How simple compared to the intertwined and endlessly complex realities of climate change and global economic collapse that we face in our daily lives.