THE RAPTURE

MICHEAL ZELEHOSKI

Times Square Arts

SPRING/BREAK Art Fair

March 5-31, 2019.

Artist Michael Zelehoski and curator Ché Morales present a 22,000- pound salvaged backhoe in the center of the bustling Broadway Plaza, deconstructed and reassembled to invoke a fossilized dinosaur. Here, the technology used to build our civilization appears extinct, reclaimed by the earth and presented as a future testament to humanity’s brief time on this planet.

Encountering The Rapture in the middle of Times Square, viewers may ask themselves if it is beast or machine, a relic of the past or a premonition of the future. The installation is almost certainly a critique, at this altar of capitalism, of humanity’s unquenchable thirst for more. The machines we build have come to define us. They may also be our ruin. The backhoe that gave it’s life for this project spent much of the eighties working around Manhattan before heading north, where it was ultimately abandoned. In a sense it is coming home.

Zelehoski’s artistic practice remains largely faithful to the original machine but contorts it into a hyperextended posture, like a dinosaur in its death throes. This condition has been shown to occur naturally only in birds and placental mammals - like us. It is associated with drowning, be it in information, consumption or the rising waters of climate change. It is a reminder of all that we have in common with our prehistoric counterparts yet while they ruled the earth for hundreds of millions of years, we have brought it to the the brink of catastrophe in the geological blink of an eye.