If you can not remember the last time you saw an art video featuring Pink Floyd standards sung in Latin plainchant, Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” performed by a community brass band and performed as an operatic aria for a soprano, cannibalism, brutalist architecture, and pretty young men, then you should get yourself to the Henry Art Gallery at 8 tonight for the opening of The Violet Hour, a new exhibition organized by curator Sara Krajewski including Jen Liu, Matthew Day Jackson, and David Maljkovic.

They are artists of the apocalypse.

Liu made the videos. (Earlier this morning, I posted a painting by her of a giant sloth with a crystal belly, surrounded by little monks in white robes scrambling around him. That painting is not in the show, but others somewhat like it are.)

Here’s an image from one of her videos. The monks are chanting “Comfortably Numb” in Latin.

Jackson’s creations include a brand new, solar-powered, crashed Corvette based on a race car that his cousin in Tumwater (Skip Nichols of Nichols Industries Racing) built, raced, and crashed. The windshield, as if shattered intact, is made of stained glass in a crystalline pattern. Inside the car is a cowboy saddle and an Apollo-era space helmet made of felt, in reference to the car, which is also made of wool felt (in reference to Joseph Beuys; Jackson’s piece is called Chariot #2 [I Like America and America Likes Me]). It’s the next step in Jackson’s series of vehicles, after his Whitney Biennial chariot.

Maljkovic is a Croatian artist whose videos are projected on the wall. But jutting out from the wall, with the videos at their farthest (center) point, are what look like a Renaissance perspective galleries (one on each video) constructed of lumber and green-blue plasterboard. In the videos, people in a post-communist daze linger under the overpowering modernist architecture of the Italian Pavilion of the Zagreb Fair.

Go!