Backrooms

Robyn O’Neil’s American Animals (2024) calls to the ancient story of the biblical Flood, recasting Genesis’s cataclysmic deluge within a contemporary framework of moral and existential collapse. O’Neil’s vast graphite seascape relocates this theology of destruction to a secular plane devoid of divine agency. Her flood is not commanded by God but is rather the inevitable consequence of human hubris, a sort of self-inflicted apocalypse. The “hordes of middle-aged white men” who populate her works now drift or drown amid tumultuous waves. This shift in tone transforms the biblical paradigm of punishment and renewal into a meditation on modern complacency.

Like the Genesis narrative, O’Neil’s work stages a confrontation between human violence and the sublime power of nature, yet her sublime is one of indifference rather than divine justice. The sea in American Animals simply exists, vast and ungovernable, swallowing its creators with the same detached grace that Melville ascribes to his own oceanic sublime. As Herman Melville writes in Moby Dick, “Meditation and water are wedded forever.” O’Neil’s water is likewise contemplative, a mirror for human folly and a medium through which annihilation and reflection merge. Her floating heads, suspended between drowning and dreaming, recall the biblical aftermath of the Flood, yet without Noah’s ark, covenant, or rainbow for salvation. In place of divine promise, O’Neil offers existential ambiguity: a world without moral architecture, where nature persists beyond meaning.

In this sense, American Animals extends the moral imagination of the Flood into the terrain of the post-sacred. Whereas Genesis culminates in covenantal hope, O’Neil’s deluge circles back to absurdity, echoing Lidia Yuknavitch’s observation that “laughter can shake you from the delirium of grief.” The laughter that remains after O’Neil’s flood is both cathartic and futile, a human gesture against the infinite. Through her synthesis of horror and humor, O’Neil transforms the biblical motif of water as divine instrument into a symbol of indifference, where judgment arises not from God but from the consequences of human action. American Animals thus reimagines the Flood as an allegory for modernity itself, an age in which renewal and destruction are two sides of the same coin.

Allison Miller’s Tree (2023) stages an encounter between perception and meaning. The green surface is layered with overlapping forms; curves, leaf-like shapes, and repeated gestures that appear to follow a system but never resolve into a coherent image. Each mark feels provisional, as if the painting were thinking through its own organization. The longer one looks, the more that logic falters; edges shift, rhythms break apart, and coherence gives way to uncertainty.

The painting’s title invites a deeper resonance. Tree recalls the Tree of Knowledge from the Garden of Eden; the moment in the biblical narrative when seeing and knowing become inseparable, and understanding carries the consequence of instability. Miller’s painting enacts a similar condition: the viewer’s search for order produces awareness of how fragile perception can be. Meaning is not simply found within the work but continually formed and undone through the act of looking.

Materially, the painting compounds this experience. Oil and acrylic mingle with lace, coins, and safety pins, introducing tactile interruptions that resist visual absorption. These objects remind the viewer that perception is not purely optical but grounded in touch, memory, and association. Each addition functions like a small rupture in the painted field.

In Tree, collapse does not signal failure but the opening of another mode of attention. The painting becomes a site where understanding is suspended, where the viewer oscillates between recognition and doubt. Much like the Tree of Knowledge, Miller’s work situates perception at the threshold of awareness, suggesting that what we come to “know” through vision is always contingent, unstable, and subject to change.