Tara Lyon’s Creative PhD exhibition, “The Post-Apocalyptic Travel Guide”

“The Post-Apocalyptic Travel Guide” follows a speculative government organization (USDOPSAC – United States Department of Public Safety and Control) tasked with documenting the conditions of the planet’s surface while also distributing safe, virtual travel experiences for survivors living in bunkers.  The virtual travel experiences include brochures, videos, a website, and photo ops with your favorite ruin.  The creative project melds truth and fiction by presenting current “truthful” documentary images of abandoned ruins in the American landscape that are contextualized into the performance of a speculative, “fictional” post-apocalyptic narrative.  The inefficiency of the actual American government is critiqued by this project’s speculative agency that ironically uses resources to placate the public with frivolous travel experiences instead of proposing actionable solutions to why the planet’s surface is uninhabitable.  The distinctions between truth and fiction become tenuous in the project revealing underlying apocalyptic dread in the American consciousness.

www.usdopsactravel.org

The exhibition will include photographic prints, one or more looped videos, interactive printed documents such as travel brochures and magazines, and an expansion of Lyon’s travel agency brochure installation from the “Grounded” exhibition at SP/N gallery.

Artist Biography            

Tara Lyon is a multimedia artist living in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex in Texas.  She is an artist, photographer, filmmaker, and writer with a focus on American culture critique.  Her primary thematic and scholarly concerns are post-apocalyptic aesthetics in landscape and documentary photography, intersectionality and representation in movies and television, the Anthropocene, and the “American Dream.”