Post-Apocalyptic Visions of Earth Aren’t So Far-Fetched at 111 Minna Gallery

Picture if you will, a very large painting (4 by 5 feet, to be precise) that acts a little bit like a Where’s Waldo scene for adults. Except, instead of Waldo and friends, the image is one of debauched, unchecked anarchy.

Men vomit, boys pee in corners, women are caught in moments of sexual congress, drunks are pickpocketed, small children ready themselves to set off firecrackers and attack people with raised knives. Making this Breugel-esque scene even stranger? The time period would appear entirely medieval if not for a banner displaying a UFO and Saturn.

This is The Wedding Party by Mike Davis, the natural end point of a compelling and disturbing exhibit titled Surviving the Plague. The paintings, currently hanging in San Francisco’s 111 Minna Gallery, depict a version of humanity that has been plunged back to the Dark Ages, save for a few surviving cell phones. Alien overlords lurk overhead in flying saucers and artwork hanging around what’s left of humanity. In this new old world, civilization as we know it is gone — and with it, modern social mores.

Davis, the owner of San Francisco’s Everlasting Tattoo shop, unabashedly embraces the bleak in this series of paintings, but never once loses his sense of humor. And the devil is in the details.

On first glance, Always Looking the Other Way, for example, is simply a gathering of tired-looking souls outside a tavern. On closer inspection, they’re all going out of their way to ignore the fiery flying saucer that has crash-landed nearby.

In No Time to Lose, a man is pinned down by a giant red scorpion and forced to sketch explanatory diagrams of every day objects. He is drawing with a feather quill despite the fact that a functioning laptop lies open on the ground before him.

The clashing visual time cues inherent across Surviving the Plague are mirrored by the other exhibit currently on display at 111 Minna. In Michael Kerbow’s Reversal of Fortune, dinosaurs have reclaimed the Earth after a series of climate disasters that are hinted at by obscured sunlight, floods and erupting volcanoes on the horizon. These post-historic monsters wade through flooded cities, around plastic detritus, over rusting car piles and underneath dilapidated fast food signs.

The wastefulness of modern comfort is writ large throughout.

The most disquieting aspect of Kerbow’s work is just how natural it all seems. In Kerbow’s hands, a herd of woolly mammoths outside a Walmart (Frozen Markets) looks eerily at home. In Highwater, a trio of brachiosauruses wading through a flooded downtown full of high-rises reclaimed by nature feels somehow … inevitable.

More than anything, Kerbow reminds us that humanity’s waste will be around on Earth eons after we’re gone. Whomever — or whatever — comes next will be left to deal with our marriage to convenience over self preservation.

Looking at Kerbow’s work, one can’t help but think about the fact that the dinosaurs were meteor-ed into extinction while living in ecological harmony with the planet. If that’s the fate that befell them, what the hell is humanity lining up for itself?

‘Survivors of the Plague x Reversal of Fortune’ is on display at 111 Minna Gallery through June 20, 2024. Viewing appointments can be made by emailing David Young at dyoungv@111minnagallery.com.