I’ve been covering a lot of art lately, given that film is lately a wasteland and television hasn’t really started back up again after the holidays. But artist Alex Pardee is more of a multimedia talent, as I learned for Wired when checking out his new nightmare exhibit Vertigo for Wired.
Sucker Punch Artist Hunts Nightmares in Vertigo
Inspired by his work on Zack Snyder’s brutal revenge fantasy Sucker Punch, artist Alex Pardee brings universal horrors to life in his expansive new exhibit, Vertigo: A Decade of Hunting Nightmares.
The original concept was to explore what the San Francisco artist calls “the 10 most popular nightmares in America — dreams of falling, losing teeth, showing up to school naked, and so forth.” But after delving into the subject, Pardee said he “decided to create different boogeymen based on different walks of life around the world.”
Pardee’s first solo exhibition at Los Angeles’ Corey Helford Gallery, Vertigo situates its phantasms around invented nightmare hunter Verti Parker, whose heroic fictional exploits form a framework that allows the artist to explore global night terrors with a universal eye.
The result is the freakout tableaux viewable in the preview gallery above, which represents just a part of Pardee’s horrific acrylic-on-wood work. Running now through Jan. 26, Vertigo is fleshed out by invented backstories for each nightmare, with artifacts from Verti Parker’s campaigns, including a music box used to exorcise demons from terrified victims and an 8-foot taxidermy monster (the hunter’s first conquest). The exhibit even boasts its own creepy promotional video (below).
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