Gerald Jenkins – It’s After The End Of The World

“A Picture novel study of the human spirit in the fantastic / magical and the human soul in the metaphorical and physical in Five Chapters – being Oppression, Rainbows, Mythology, Cosmology, Salvation.This book is inscribed in wounds that cannot scar the spirit. This book is a tool to foster awareness of oracle as bibliomancy. This book predicts its own improvement as necessity. It’s After the End of the World declares a moment of deep insight — of profound listening — amidst the buzzing alarms and alerts that characterize the status quo. It’s After the End of the World is a manifestation of the eternally unbreakable reality that casts aside the laws of civilised progress. It’s After the End of the World represents a milestone for the foreverism of an immeasurable cosmic organism that Sun Ra and the legion of Arkestra players in his sungates led Gerald Jenkins to imagine as returned to us. Photographer Gerald Jenkins has long identified as an outsider, and his vast oeuvre spanning nearly four decades reflects his natural affiliation with others who sit similarly at the fringes. His photographic subjects bring their own powerful identities to bear on his work, and Jenkins’ ever-evolving artistic process reflects their varied contributions to his ongoing study of the tension between Western capitalism and ancient spirituality. Incorporating traditional craftsmanship into a nontraditional methodology, he manufactures his own imaginative props for shoots—seashell headphones, moon-shaped facemasks, disco-ball helmets—hand-crafts unique frames, and appropriates imagery from his own extensive archive to create complex, multilayered collages reflecting a worldview at once conspiratorially cynical and profoundly hopeful. With visual overtones of Sam Haskins’ picture novels, these artworks synthesize Jenkins’ many years photographing for fashion magazines and cinema, his documentation of Australian Indigenous Culture, and his ongoing relationship as photographer and friend with the members of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, whose philosophies and corresponding aesthetics gave him the creative entry point he had been seeking to contemplate what indeed comes after the end of the world as we know it.”

Art-Yard, 2019 Hardcover edition. Light wear to corners.