Images from Adam Shecter's Last Men video installation at Eleven Rivington (2011)

Drawing inspiration from four classic sci-fi novels, Adam Shecter recently created a dense sci-fi paperback of his own titled Last Men. Filled with images, drawings, photographs, and intermittent text, the book is an expanded companion piece to an animation titled Last Men, also by Shecter, exhibited recently at Eleven Rivington. The book opens with an image of a book with the words erased, a photo of blades of grass, and blurry hands clasped amidst an even blurrier background. Without page numbers, you're left to browse Shecter's imaginary, post-apocalyptic world using your own instincts. Browsing beyond a few sequential pages of TV static reveals a sea of black and white pages, a pastiche of coded, grainy, and macro images interrupted by drifting, melancholic poems and a few zoomed in clips from books. The contributions from 2-UP's Matthea Harvey, Christian Hawkey, and Cathy Park Hong add threads of a human presence that balance out the pages of monochrome, galactic noise.

Stopping somewhere near the end of the book to read Hong's Aubade Using Bradbury's Lines, I was reminded of Chris Marker's 1962 experimental sci-fi film La Jetée. And as I continued turning the pages, Hong's poem stayed with me narrating the incomplete diagrams and deep-black night shots of stars. In the end Shecter succeeds in creating a vision of a distant future where humankind reflects on a past we have yet to write.

Oh yes, we knew, we understood. And, looking into each other's faces for confirmation of what we felt, it was there—the future.

- excerpt from The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 by Doris Lessing