Taking the form of speculative abstraction, Palindrome/Anagram Painting 19 is an assembly of signs, exploratory impulses, and ruminations. Images that evoke botanical, sub-oceanic, celestial, and geological formations coalesce to reveal the signatures of growth, evolution, and entropy. A hand-drawn graph lies underneath the imagery. As in a palindrome, the painting can be read in multiple directions, and like an anagram, forms rearrange to create a web of associations. The seating in the exhibition space has been arranged to assume the shape of the two hands of the Doomsday Clock.
This conceptual clock, updated annually by esteemed (and many Nobel Prize-winning) members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947, uses the analogy of the countdown to midnight – symbolizing the apocalypse – to denounce the threats hanging over humanity. In 2021, we are now at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest we have ever come to the end of civilization as we know it. Kallat’s symbolic seating here is at ‘two minutes to midnight,’ setting back the clock to 2018 when the artist began working on the painting.
