We All Float Down Here

Description

The phrase “We all Float Down Here” is a line uttered by the evil clown (as played by Tim Curry) in the 1990 television mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s novel “IT.” The clown, in that scene, is beckoning to a young child from beneath a sewer grate. Come down here, join us. Come to the dark side. We all float down here. In this television series and the novel that it’s based on, the clown itself is revealed, ultimately, to be merely one face of a greater, pervasive evil that has infected the town of Derry, Maine. Evil isn’t just the monster or evil force embodied by Pennywise the clown (or later a swamp monster or a spider), it’s something in the town. Everyone is somehow complicit with this dark force, turning a blind eye to their own dark urges as well as the bloody history of their town. There is, so to speak, something rotten in Derry.

As in “IT”, Alison OK Frost and Elwyn Palmerton have ventured into this dark territory together, as friends. In “IT”, that’s the only way that Pennywise (or the evil force that he embodied) could be defeated by a group of pre-adolescent outcasts: by the power of their friendship, reunited as adults, and joined in common cause. Similarly to the protagonists of that story, Frost and Palmerton also possess a strong faith in the power of talismans and their ability to effect magical transformations. Here, however, instead of an asthma inhaler that shoots battery acid to kill The Deathly Spider, they’ve chosen found images from various sources (both contemporary photographs and art-historical images) as their weapon of choice. This source material was chosen by Frost and Palmerton individually and then presented to the other artist as a type of challenge: make something from this. Or, rather, follow it into the darkness to see where it leads. Of course, if THE EVIL IS IN THE TOWN then the evil resides inside all of us.

The images themselves amount to a beckoning darkness, traces of the monstrousness and inhumanity inherent in all our histories and imaginations. The clown isn’t a clown in the sewer, it’s a part of ourselves, actually: The Evil Clown Part. We are Pennywise and Pennywise is us. The trail of images (that the artists offered to each other and now extend to you as viewers) is both the Evil Clown beckoning from the sewer and the journey of the brave children into the darkness of the cave on their mission to defeat this evil. This series of drawings, paintings and prints by these two artists grapples with both the darkness and the thin veneer of banality beyond which this darkness resides. If The Evil is In The Town then we are all both Pennywise and the Brave Innocent Children, now grown, but still essentially “good”, who venture into the cave to confront this evil. That is, we all float down here.

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