Childhood: 1995 captures the mental landscape I inhabited as a child living under the looming certainty of Armageddon. Growing up with Jehovah’s Witnesses’ apocalyptic teachings, I absorbed striking visuals from the Watch Tower publication Revelation: It’s Grand Climax at Hand, now pasted into this collage. When I was seven, these prophetic illustrations of the Four Horsemen, Paradise, and biblical beasts were impressed upon me as the very fabric of reality, guiding how I lived and who I believed I must be.
This biblical reality clashed with my lived experiences as a child in the late 20th century. Clippings from National Geographic magazine ads of the 1990s like the Energizer Bunny, the Magic 8 Ball, and early computer graphics reflect the bright optimism of technological consumerism that also influenced my worldview, a direct contradiction to the doomed world I was told I lived in.
The phrase "millions now living will never die," was a Watch Tower campaign from the early 1920s, promising that millions would survive Armageddon. As the campaign was so old, I remember feeling lucky I was born right under the wire, and would also never die. Other relics such as the Chart of The Ages, Chronological Chart of Revelation, and depictions of pyramidology were unknown to myself as a child, but were the hidden underpinnings of the religion. Learning about them later in life, as well as the 1920s promise being broken (as there are not millions of centarians) lead to my eventual revelation that Armageddon was, indeed, not coming.
At once surreal and deeply personal, Childhood: 1995 reflects my own confusion, anxiety, and dark humor as I grew up amid chronic cognitive dissonance between my lived experiences and an imposed doomed reality.
Childhood: 1995 | 2024 | Collaged images and transparent prints on holographic foiled wood panel with resin | 17”x11”
