Swimming to Hades: The Shaman and the Necromancer

Exhibition catalogue essay for Phillip George's 'Swimming to Hades' exhibition (& Gallery, Sorrento, Victoria; 18 May – 9 June).
Homer’s positive simile of cyclical biological human renewal contrasts sharply to Toynbee’s stern negative analogy of Humanity’s self-inflicted, potential Armageddon. Ancient and modern viewpoints express two key elements underlying – or arguably driving – the deep, broad complexities of the human condition: creation and extinction. Cyclical and linear conceptions of history have often attempted to exorcise each other across time, space, societies, cultures, religions, economic systems and political regimes for legitimising their interpretive hegemony, revealing in the process, the struggle and transience of all civilisations. Michel Foucault’s perception of the tightly intertwined, symbiotic relationships fusing power, knowledge and discourse exposes the default mechanisms of the ‘choices’ that as human beings, ‘we determine’, that ‘are determined’ and that ‘are determining’. We stand upon a razor’s edge of being and/or ending, of renewal and/or destruction – we create, but we destroy. Humankind is its own existential threat. Digital photo-media artist, Phillip George’s 'Swimming to Hades' exhibition evocatively pursues this notion.