Illustrations inspired by Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings and its adaptation in Matthew Barney’s film River of Fundament.
The modern architecture of the City of Detroit is homogeneously integrated with architectural elements and motifs from ancient civilizations, creating a unique fusion of past and present.
In this series, the architectural body of Detroit becomes an unlikely vessel for mythic recursion. Modernist façades, industrial husks, and late-century towers are subtly sutured with sculptural echoes drawn from ancient civilizations—Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and pre-classical lineages whose visual grammars underlie Mailer’s vast mythopoetic narrative and Barney’s operatic metamorphoses.
The city’s geometry absorbs these archaic motifs as if they were latent sediment rising to the surface: lintels that mimic funerary thresholds, window grids that allude to ritualized repetitions, steel beams behaving like half-eroded stelae. Detroit is neither backdrop nor metaphor here; it is a contemporary necropolis continuously reborn through industry, collapse, and renewal—an urban analogue to Mailer’s cyclical resurrection myth and Barney’s alchemical transformations of matter and identity.
Each illustration—generated through an interplay between AI processes and the artist’s own photographic fieldwork—functions as a glyph in a larger visual liturgy. They are not depictions of architecture so much as speculations about what architecture remembers: how ruins can be projected forward into the future, how the monumental past survives in the city’s present tense, and how myth persists by infiltrating the built environment.
This Limited Edition series positions Detroit as a site where ceremonial antiquity and contemporary urbanism converge, producing images that oscillate between documentation and dream, archaeology and futurism. The works stand as artifacts of a city engaged in perpetual transformation, where ancient narratives do not simply influence the present but are materially reconstituted within it.
