Animalau Blog

REFLECT:TROPIC opens tomorrow! Come and enjoy wine and art at Navillus Gallery (110 Davenport Road) from 6-8pm. The exhibition will run until December 16th.

This guy is a monster! At four feet wide, he is my biggest ink painting yet.

detail:

-Christie

I have been preparing for my third show at Navillus Gallery!

press-release

Opening Reception:

November 17th

6-8pm

110 Davenport Road

One of the two series I will be exhibiting is The Replicators. While hiking through Tortugera National Park, I was impressed with the variety of plant species and their many survival solutions, particularly the epiphytes. These plants survive many feet off the air, growing on top of branches of large trees.

Since the series began four years ago, I have been inspired by other gardens exhibiting wild growth and patterns. Coral, crystals, flowers and ferns are some of the forms that I abstract and synthesize in this new chapter. These pieces are a meditation on how replicators bloom, mutate, wither and spread. I am especially touched by their perseverance and potential.

RAINFOREST: 

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OCEAN: 

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CAVE:

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FOREST:

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-Christie

…and the water around us! Last March I went to Phuket for a dive in Koh Phi Phi. It was the first time I saw such lush and gigantic coral. Scuba diving is the closest I will ever get to knowing what it is like in space- the immensity of black water, the altered laws of movement and the disquieting notion that the body is dependent on a few devices that seem advanced and crude at the same time.

The colours, textures and shimmer of the coral and animals were so striking I wanted to use them as inspiration for a Replicators piece.

Just before we ascended we got caught in the middle of a bait ball. It was pretty trippy. The fish were silver as they approached vanishing point but up close they had red stripes and googly eyes.

-Christie

Arthur Rackham is my first favourite illustrator. The flora in his drawings have an elegant wildness while his lines and compositions bring you to a land where trees and waves bow to your emotional state. I thought I would use my inks and try out his technique and composition from one of his Midsummer Night’s Dream pieces.

-Christie

Sometimes when I see a sad and bullied pigeon I think about his or her dinosaur ancestors and the Simpsons episode (Treehouse of Horror V) where Homer accidentally makes a time machine out of his toaster. He repeatedly disturbs the past and causes chain reactions which snowball into strange realities where humans have evolved into different forms. After much trial and error,  he finally arrives at a present where humans are normal except they have lizard like tongues. So sometimes I imagine the sad pigeon is living in a catastrophic present.

The Simpsons storyline is based on a short story published in 1952 called “A Sound of Thunder” written by Ray Bradbury. In the future, Time Safari Inc. offers time traveling safaris to the late Cretaceous Era so that patrons can hunt dinosaurs. What a juicy plot!

-Christie

-Christie

-Christie

Opening Reception for “Endlings” at Navillus Gallery, 110 Davenport Road, is from 6-8pm, April 17th. The exhibition will run until May 22!

-Christie

An endling is the last living individual animal of a species.

Human activity has caused many animal extinctions, and all we have left of these lost species are skeletons and broken up DNA. Today, however, scientists are discussing the moral and logistical reasons for resurrecting extinct species by using DNA information from museum specimens and advancements in genomic technology. This has inspired a range of visceral reactions, such as adult horror and childlike wonder. Animal resurrection is a unique and contemporary question we are facing- humans, the most intelligent species on earth, have the hard-earned power to make right what we have done wrong, and we are considering it now because we can feel regret and honour in our hearts.

When I was in Paris last summer, I visited the Museum of Evolution and saw a small exhibit about fluorite crystals. Fluorite crystals come in a wide range of colours, but when exposed to light they all gradually succumb to the UV radiation and turn clear, losing their bright colour. When an organism dies, one of the first things to disappear is also its colour, although colour pattern might still be preserved. It made me think of crystals living secret pure lives in hidden and fragile colours.

Around this time, I was reading a book by Linda Kalof, called “Looking at Animals in Human History”, which details a repetitive story of humans interpreting animals by anthropomorphizing them and using them as creatures of information rather than communication. When animals are exposed to humans, they gradually lose their ephemeral essence and way of life. I saw colourless crystal structures as a metaphor for our museum of skeletons and fragmented DNA- a basic blueprint of form but emptied of life.

In my new series, I grow crystals on a mirror and subsequently paint a thin portrait of an endling in greyscale. Although the animal is without colour, the viewer infuses his her own in the reflection of the mirror, breathing artificial life to the endling. The viewer can choose to focus vision on the animal itself, or on him or herself. You can see yourself in the mirror in the eyes of the endling, or you can look at the animal as its own being. This is Benjamin:

One of the candidates for de-extinction is the thylacine, a marsupial carnivore native to Tasmania. After occurrences of sheep attacks on the first European settlements, the Van Diemen’s Land Company and later the Tasmanian Government offered bounties for their bodies from mid to late 1800s. By 1933, the endling of the thylacine species was captured and brought to Hobart Zoo. His name was Benjamin and he lived for three years in a small fenced enclosure. On September 7th, 1936, locked out of his sheltered sleeping enclosure and unable to survive the extreme temperatures of the heat of day and cold of night, he unceremoniously died of neglect.

-Christie

Iridescent plants

A second 22×30 in Replicators. Come see it sparkle at Art Toronto, booth 444 with Navillus Gallery!

Detail images:

-Christie