It's an art exhibit that predicts a bleak future.

photo: Lia Hardin / seattlepi.com

Curated by the Henry Art Gallery's Sara Krajewski, "The Violet Hour" predicts what the exhibit's media release calls a "prodigal generation" -- a generation "that will emerge from the socio-political strife and environmental degradation now accumulating on the global stage."

It might seem like it's reaching to be "new" and "different," but the exhibit's use of modern media like florescent tubes and video is completely in keeping with its driving theme. The reference in question is to the twilight described in T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land":

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea
T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"

It's one of the poem's seminal moments -- T.S. Eliot himself writes in the poem's notes that Tiresias is the "most important personage in the poem" -- and it's treated as such by artists Matthew Day Jackson, Jen Liu and David Maljkovic.

Although it's hard to tell from the brief excerpt above, "The Waste Land" is a bleak poem, punctuated by death, entropy, destruction, despair, isolation and fragmentation.

The artists embrace the poem's environment and create pieces that update it. This is no mid-twentieth century world of indifference and fragmentation, but a twenty-first century contemplation of a future the curator calls a "heterotopia" -- utopias and failed utopias together.

Like Eliot, the artists work with fragments and pieces of imagined legends to create a world exhausted by modernity. Eliot writes:

What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

The artists' works are no strangers to collapsing cities. David Maljkovic's videos and "Lost Pavilion" series show a sequenced of fragmented collages:

photo: Lia Hardin / seattlepi.com

And in her videos and paintings, Jen Liu presents an imagined order called the "Brethren of the Stone" -- men dressed as monks who reject modern living:

photo: video still courtesy Henry Art Gallery

The monks, who ransack a car as they chant the lyrics to Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" in Latin, would seemingly welcome the disintegration of cities.

Liu also addresses the themes of death and resurrection, in the form of recycling.

In her wall-sized mural "Testament of 1368: Light-burst of the End," the installation at the center is made of candles -- among other media -- worked into the shape of a recycling symbol.

photo: Lia Hardin / seattlepi.com

Matthew Day Jackson, too, addresses death and our linkage to the natural world in his "Missing Link (x-ray)" ...

photo: Lia Hardin / seattlepi.com

...and makes a statement about going off the grid in his "I Like America and America Likes Me," which is powered by a solar array installed on the Henry's roof.

photo: Lia Hardin / seattlepi.com

Although I'm probably not in the majority, I have contended that Eliot's poem offers its audience a positive resolution in the form of community, a world permeated by emotion and fragments that finally come together and reconnect.

Sadly, the exhibit is missing that positive resolution. But it's still worth seeing.

"The Violet Hour" continues through Oct. 12, 2008, in the Samuel and Althea Stroum Gallery at the Henry.

photo: Lia Hardin / seattlepi.com