Day of the Living Dead is the latest release from Terry Flaxton, and is part of the collection The Living Dead.
* All earnings from the sales of this artwork will be donated to the UN Refugee Agency, Ukraine Emergency Response to benefit victims of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Reverie of Forgotten Dreams will be gifted to anyone who purchases Day of the Living Dead.
As with Day of the Dead from early 2021, the new collection consists of three photographically based works by Flaxton, each exploring different themes. Day of the Living Dead is a meditation on our relationship to nature.
The work invokes Magritte’s faceless man to address the difficulty of our relationship to nature. Our endless efforts to subvert and control nature may well spell disaster, and our destructive and reckless attitude to the world upon which we all depend leads us to the spectre of Magritte's faceless man, unknowing, uncaring and unknowable. Nature's plight is watched from a distance, as though we were safeguarded spectators of a sinking ship.
There are also elements of Chris Marker’s La Jetée in this work where a narrative is pursued in mostly still photographic images to confront an inevitable end - and Magritte again returns at the end, absurdly, as the dark character who stands in for, we humans, multiplying infinitely until there’s nothing else for it, except for nature to reject us.
