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Cave of Sorrows, Corruption Valley, First Murder - A Multimedia Assault on the Senses
The Cave of Sorrows, Corruption Valley, and First Murder rooms are
designed to leave your head spinning and scared amidst dark, dreary,
lonely rooms pock-marked with evil. The floors are at times literally
tilted to leave you feeling unbalanced as you increasingly wish to
escape the images of skulls, death, wolves, and the face of evil cast
on a strangely angled, unruly, and asymmetrical concrete screen. The
cacophony of sirens, screams, and other awful noises assault the ears
haphazardly, leaving you as eager to escape as any fire alarm. The
wooden door to a tenement house covered with locks implies danger here,
and perhaps loneliness behind the door.
Together, eyes, ears, and touch are aggressively assaulted (and
manipulated thereby) in this immersive conceptual art, leaving us
feeling violated and vulnerable. This is all intentional, of course,
for it signals the immorality, evil, and corruption that arise after
the fall. As with the rest of the museum, however, this is not a
neutral experience for our senses and minds, but rather a set-up to
maximize the persuasive potency of the remarkable video in the Last
Adam Theatre.
These rooms are designed to further break us down, to expose and
thereby ready us for a message of beauty and hope – not simply to
experience it, but to embrace, believe, and cling to it as the antidote
to the corruptive horrors that surround us here. As we are told by the
marketing that surrounds and pervades the Creation Museum: “Prepare to
believe”.
In essence, once we have seen these rooms the real underlying message becomes palpably clear: “Prepare to believe, or else.”
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Exhibits: Cave of Sorrows
