Arizona-based artist Jimmy Fike asks, what will the end of the world like like? His answer is weird—and weirdly hopeful.
Phoenix, Arizona | jimmyfike.com | @jimmyfike
If you had to guess, what would the end of the world look like? What kinds of plants survive the apocalypse? What new colors saturate the sky? These are the questions that appear to have consumed artist and educator Jimmy Fike, whose vibrant and bizarre drawings in his Fire Followers series depict an uncanny new world that is perhaps not so distant from our own. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1970—at the height of the Psychedelic Era—Fike showed an affinity for both art and nature at an early age.
Though he might be better known for his photographic archive of wild, edible plants, which he compiled into a book in 2022, his most recent series has returned to the questions that dominated the America of his youth, when the eras of J.F.K., L.B.J., and Nixon teetered on the brink of nuclear fallout. Those questions did not ask “If,” but rather, “when the world ends, what becomes of humanity?”
Fike’s series seems to offer several answers. In Fire Followers vs. Hongos (2022), a blue baby—“the last human baby” and protagonist of the series—carrying a bow and a small dagger races across a post-apocalyptic landscape. Behind him, a range of volcanoes erupt in unison, filling the air with fire and smoke. Beneath his feet, flowers struggle to grow in ashen earth. In this world, life is marked by violence, and death is around every corner.
Opossum Succumbs (2023), completed one year later, offers something of an alternative reality. Equally fantastic but a touch less violent, creatures with mushroom-like heads and tentacle-like bodies crawl around the corpse of an opossum, consuming its flesh and dancing, apparently in a delirious state. In this world, the sky is still blue and the trees are still green—and life, however odd, has found a way to make the most of the after-effects of death.
In the face of our present climate crisis, these works resonate deeply. As do the words, “We are all who remain in the wilderness,” which Fike painted across the top of his earliest piece in the series, Fire Follower Convivium (2021). “It has been prophesied / fear not sentients we shall reemerge / water and blood forming a new spring / in an ancient loam.” In Fike’s reality, hope and the apocalyptic don’t appear to be mutually exclusive.
