Post-Human: solo show at 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 set of work imagined a near-future in which humans failed to save the earth for future generations. Pandemics, global warming, and our own divisiveness 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 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 this show was screen prints that began by building imagined scenes using photography and digital collage. I then re-created the scenes in 6-9 layer screen prints of lines, fields of color, and stipples, including stippled textures generated by computer code that I devised, with additional painting and pochoir added by hand to most prints. Two of the pieces in the show were photogravure prints.

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