On March 13, 1993, Arline Erdrich awoke amidst the fury of an unnamed hurricane. The storm was flattening her seaside village of Aripeka, Florida. Waves lapped at the second-floor deck of her house, which only avoided total swamping because it stood several feet above the ground on stilts. The voices of her less fortunate neighbors, panicked and desperate, reached her from outside as she watched her home and studio being flooded by the storm surge.

While the storm raged, 14 people took refuge in Erdrich's home. One man, exhausted by the effort of hauling his family to safety, collapsed and died on her floor. Hours later, a rescue vehicle brought Erdrich and the other survivors to greater safety inland, and the storm passed.

In its wake the storm left destruction and chaos -- and lives to be rebuilt. Even Erdrich, whose home remained standing, lost paintings and other possessions to the flooding. But more than material things had changed. "A storm leaves you perceiving things differently," she says. The quiet green waters of the Gulf of Mexico were calm again, but they had roared with elemental force, bringing change and challenge. The storm brought a new, urgent vision into Erdrich's life.

"I was overwhelmed with ideas and images," she recalls, "and they came pouring out." She began a new series of works, some of which are gathered here. Initially she meant to call her the sequence "In Memory of a Storm," but as she worked she realized it was about something broader in human experience, something more than the hurricane itself. "I started taking notice of other catastrophes," Erdrich says. "Earthquakes, tornadoes, disasters in Japan and Italy, all happening seemingly so close together." Together with her own experience of catastrophic illness -- Erdrich fought a successful five-year battle with Hodgkin's disease in the 1970s -- these distant disasters brought Erdrich to a realization. "I saw that all these paintings dealt not just with one story, nor just with environmental disasters, but with survival itself. The storm became a metaphor for all these experiences."

This sequence of works, now called "The Chaos Series," evokes the many emotional states and changes that come with experiencing and surviving any sort of catastrophe -- fear and foreboding, anxiety and depression, grief and sorrow, hope and renewal, triumph and recovery. Anyone who's been through a disaster of any kind should see something of their experience in these paintings. As Erdrich puts it, "They're about experiencing the hurricanes of life."

-- Robert K. J. Killheffer

---

Home || Prime Time || Live Science || Machine Dreams || Project Open Book || SF-Fantasy-Horror
Continuum || Antimatter || Mind-Brain Lab || Interactive IQ || Gallery || OMNI Toons

Questions, comments and suggestions can be mailed to the webmaster.

Copyright © 1998 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.