ARTIST'S STATEMENT
People talk about the decline of the West, but only rarely address its root cause. A society's decay points to a diseased culture — and at our studio, we see art as an antidote.
Modern society suffers a spiritual deficit: for the past three centuries, a one-sided emphasis on materialist, technological advancement has reduced and hollowed out our view of life and human nature. We have become consumers and citizens, but not creators. We have mass consumerism and mass scrolling, but not mass creation. Society is a bureaucracy, but not yet the sculpture we all create together.
The art we make is meant to be a remedy.
The artist known as Apocalypse, b. 1971
To define and strengthen this renewal is the mission of the Apocalypse Studio.
“Apocalypse” means reveal, not Armageddon. Our work explores the strengthening the spiritual aspect of the human being: perception, imagination, will, discernment, conscience. These have been greatly damaged in our age, and in our view, they must be saved. Saving them, as the artist Joseph Beuys once said, saves everything else.
These questions concern both the individual and society. Do we want to co-create our world, or let it be run by the worst in us, amplified to power? If the answer is co-creation, we must save the human soul, so to speak, and cultivate its creative abilities.
The Studio has spent decades stacking the disciplines that make our work possible: the study of consciousness, the practices of making visual art, building creative conditions for other people, and leading social sculpture projects in war-torn regions, collapsed economies, and other difficult settings. All of this flows together in a many-sided practice.
Our studio makes objects and crafts experiences: paintings that move, mosaics that read as one piece and as many; and convenings where strangers do real work in each other’s presence. Whether in the art world or social practice, we aim for the movement and discovery of essential faculties: a felt sense of vivid participation, a life unfolding as structured and co-creative mystery. This discovery, in the self and in each other, builds community on the basis of, and not against, the process of individuation.
The logic defining the studio’s approach is as follows. We begin with the familiar—the sense of isolation, of wasted potential; the fear of a life not fully lived—and proceed to the individual’s potential for spiritual freedom and self-determination. From there, we build the discipline for creation, and beyond it, social creativity.
The rest—the medium, the market, the moment—we negotiate as we go.
POWER LAWS, edition
BIOGRAPHY
My work explores the human being’s role as co-creators of culture and civilization. How do we become creative? What are the risks to life and society if we fail to do so? Today I pursue these questions with a social and visual practice, but for many years, my path ran largely outside the art world. The questions I work on demanded it, and the work took me wherever the question led — into apprenticeship, into systems work around the world, into cryptoart — and now into a phase of integration both within and outside of art institutions.
This unusual approach began in my undergraduate years. I resisted specialization, worked across disciplines, and explored what I called "creative consciousness," the type of thinking and perception active in creative work. Postponing graduate school, I spent the mid-1990s in Europe, finding artistic direction in both great painting and Joseph Beuys' work and concept of social sculpture.
Apocalypse at university, 1990s
I came back to the States to study phenomenology with my mentor Dennis Klocek at the Rudolf Steiner College and, intrigued that art could serve a social purpose, I returned to Europe to apprentice with Miha Pogačnik, the Slovenian Ambassador of Culture. Co-producing Miha’s intercultural festivals provided a practical training in building creative conditions at scale. I started the Apocalypse Studio in 1998, and earned my MFA from the Maine College of Art in 2003 under the great multi-disciplined artist William Pope.L.
By the time I finished my MFA, the art world seemed insular and performative. In 2007, I co-founded Reos Partners, a social change consultancy, with Adam Kahane and others, including Mustafa Suleyman, later of DeepMind and Microsoft. Working at Reos and my later firm Magenta, I designed and facilitated high stakes, cross-system, multi-stakeholder projects in more than twenty countries on some of the world's most intractable problems: gang violence, child protection, indigenous relations, drug abuse, energy transition, and peace building.
Castle Borl, Slovenia, site of IDRIART festivals, 1990s
From this work, I learned that culture is the source of every society’s complex social problems, and only in culture can their solutions be found. But I also saw that in systems work, culture is “out of bounds.” It struck me that culture, of course, is the proper and precise domain of art. And I found only two leaders — Edi Rama of Albania and Antanas Mockus of Colombia — who used art to activate culture at scale and fundamentally change their societies for the better.
Thus I began to assemble the pieces: Beuys’ concept of social sculpture requires an activated culture. The phenomenological tradition points to the activation of culture in the individual mind and soul. To reach people, I cultivated a relatable, street-smart visual language drawing from contemporary greats. The visual work would depict the faculties the social work aims to activate. How to weave the practices together was the next challenge.
Projects in Holland, United States, Zimbabwe, Melbourne, New Zealand, Canada
When the pandemic closed the consulting world in 2020, I set my social practice aside and brought the visual practice forward full-time under the studio name Apocalypse. Since then, the studio has earned over 350 ETH in primary sales, exhibited internationally, built an international collector base, and grown to include my elder daughter as co-producer.
The studio's current work is The Oversoul, a 12×12 mosaic of 144 contiguous animated paintings made in collaboration with my two daughters over four years. Every piece is both singular and part of the whole; each figure belongs in a coherent larger structure exactly as each person belongs in a community and society. The Oversoul is the third chapter of a larger body of work, The InFlux, and the studio's first attempt to bring the visual and social practices together in a single piece. The visual focus is the mosaic itself; the social focus is the imperative the work carries forward, i.e. the activation of the cultural layer with specific social-sculptural intent. The Oversoul asks a single question of everyone it meets: in this world that we shape together, what are you doing with your consciousness and creative potential?
The studio is developing further projects that further integrate visual and social practice, including for example The Spires, a school grounded in phenomenology, experience, and creativity, and a local, town-based project designed to convene stakeholders in a dialogue about the region’s future.
The studio’s founding question remains the one I have held since I was nineteen: what activates a human being to become a creator?
ON THE RUN, from The Oversoul
THRESHOLD, from The Oversoul