After Effects by Daniele Del Nero

Embarrassing but true: this past weekend, I finally threw away the carved pumpkin that had been living on my front steps since before Halloween. It was growing some pretty nasty stuff, but stuff neither as nasty nor as neat as the molds featured in After Effects a series of dilapidated scale models built and photographed by Daniele Del Nero. Del Nero describes the project’s impetus as “…the sense of time and destiny of the planet after the human species.” It sounds as joyful as the 1994 Asylum series by James Casebere (another artist working with scale models, if you like that sort of thing). I think what’s more compelling about Del Nero’s models is how simultaneously dangerous and fragile they are. If you eat this stuff that covers them, you could die; if you touch this stuff that covers them, you will destroy the fuzzy colonies that have been meticulously cultivated across their surfaces.

Del Nero builds these models out of black paper and covers them with flour and small samples of mold. May I suggest simply using pumpkin?

Alex