A Post-Apocalyptic Imagination: Lindsay Smith
Games of make believe have long propelled the human imagination and given rise to a unique genre of literature: speculative fiction. Of particular interest in this wide-ranging genre is the kind of speculation rooted in contemporary reality and, more often than not, current anxieties and hopes. When pursued into possible futures, these scenarios become all the more disturbing or intriguing. After all, they could come to pass. Starting with the deceptively simple question—what if?—readers are asked to imagine where our contemporary world may take us: into places both eerily familiar and utterly strange.
Lindsay Smith’s new body of work shares this preoccupation with what might be. Her carefully water-colored drawings ask viewers to imaginatively enter into a possible future, one where defunct cars litter the landscape, water is precious, and people roam nomadically in search of food. Far from the culture industry’s self-indulgent survivor TV series, Smith’s work stands out for its conceptual sincerity, formal quality, and environmental relevance. The materials Smith works with—pencil and watercolor—are positively post-industrial in their simplicity, an important decision, given the conceptual context of the work.
Reminiscent of James Howard Kunstler’s 2008 novel World Made By Hand, Smith’s drawings take us into a rural Midwestern landscape, where living off the land no longer sounds like a hollow hippie slogan but becomes a dire necessity for sheer survival’s sake. Rather than provide all the answers to what got us to this imaginary time and place, Smith asks us to picture the ordinary, quotidian moments of this possible future. There is no room for grand heroics in her obstinately mundane vision. Yet more than once, Smith’s figures—her characters, really—are depicted as if caught in the act of looking: at a pink gash in the sky, a sunrise over a goldenrod-covered plain, or a stream running over generations of plastic garbage. Regardless of how dire the circumstance, Smith allows the denizens of this future world moments to appreciate the beauty around them. Indeed, the artist seems to insist that these moments are crucial—at least as much as the material nourishment the characters are busy stockpiling, guarding, or gathering.
The scenes Smith chooses to represent invite an open-ended engagement that fosters speculative, private fictions to emerge. Smith privileges this lack of closure, embraces the uncertainty and unreliability characteristic of postmodern storytelling, and translates it into a loose visual narrative that conceptually unifies the entire body of work. Yet despite the strong narrative quality, Smith steers clear of confining herself to illustration: the images do not accompany an existing narrative and do not literally illustrate. Instead, they serve as springboards for intimate acts of looking that potentially lead to more intimate acts of meaning-making and private speculation. In other words, what Smith shows us is just as important as the way she invites us to imagine, to question, to participate, and speculate on our own.
This call to agency, along with the close attention Smith’s work invites, is no empty gesture. Throughout this body of work, Smith’s concern with ecological balance and environmental destruction is tangible. The artist strategically invokes natural beauty—the golden sweep of a prairie, for instance—to lure viewers into a scene before casually disrupting the pleasure of this view with the ugly reminders of consumer culture’s waste: plastic garbage, car wrecks, and seeping toxic waste. While it is entirely possible to find aesthetic appeal among the ruins, as Smith’s characters do, getting caught up in the beauty misses the essential point here: what Smith shows us are only the visible traces of environmental decay—not radiation or pandemic plagues, not an ecological habitat that is not only out of balance but beyond the point of restoration. While it is certainly possible to approach this work as the visual equivalent of speculative fiction, its charge ultimately includes a political dimension: do we want our future to look this way? And if not, is there something we can do?
Smith’s work is hardly a propagandistic call to the barricades of the environmental movement, but it is steeped in a certain green zeitgeist that speculates aloud on the repercussions of our energy-intensive way of life. Smith’s is not an imagination obsessed with the consequences of disaster but with an incessant stream of questions about the meaning we find and make in the frequently careless way we go about our lives. Rather than pass judgment, though, the artist asks, innocuously, what if…?
Bibliography
James Howard Kunstler. World Made By Hand. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008.
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