Post-Human: solo show in Peel Gallery in Fall 2021

The pandemic gave me a lot of time sitting in one place, working from home alongside my family, our dog, and our chickens. On weekends I went to my shed-studio and screen printed homemade public service announcements about pandemic safety. My son and I posted them publicly late at night. And I worried about the future. At times our chickens walked into the shed, and eventually, they crept into the artwork.  

This work imagines a near-future in which humans have failed to save the earth for future generations. Pandemics, global warming, and our own divisiveness have finally eliminated us. But this imagined apocalypse comes with a silver lining: the earth will probably be just fine. Animals and plants will survive and perhaps even thrive in our absence. The animals that we’ve domesticated, like chickens, just might need to move indoors. 

My artwork often involves subtle levity in the face of serious or dire situations. Humor has a long history of helping people rethink entrenched ideas, by circumventing naturally defensive responses to more direct forms of confrontation. And humor can sometimes make real, human connections across broad divides. 

The technical stuff: Most of the art in the show began by building imagined scenes using photography and digital collage. I then re-created the scenes in multiple-layer screen prints of lines, fields of color, and stipples, including stippled textures generated by a homemade computer algorithm, with additional painting and pochoir added by hand. Two of the pieces in the show are photogravure prints.

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