Genus

For some thirty years I’ve worked on an intricate series of large drawings, uniformly titled, “Genus”. This name refers to an imagined taxonomy of related works and images. Uniformly sized to human proportions, these drawings attempt to strike a disquieting parallel between viewer and work.

I think of this group as an ever emerging bestiary of improbable, biomorphic hybrids. Made of conjoined tree roots, plant parts, displaced organs, insect fragments, and machine parts, the images occupy their frames like curious specimens in archival vitrines. In my drawing process, breakdown and recomposition shuffle familiar anatomies into eccentric combinations. Formal relationships and symmetries within the work tie together these improbable unions.

Obsessively detailed, and drawing on traditional natural history illustration, I hope the work suggests an unfolding metamorphosis as seen through multiple iterations, creating unsolved mysteries about biological origins and evolutionary dead ends. Tending to neither subvert nor transcend realism, these works are much more science fiction than science.