Field Guide

Littlejohn Contemporary, New York, January 3-February 12, 2005

This exhibition of new of work, titled “Field Guide”, opened at Littlejohn Contemporary on January 3, 2005. It includes several sets or series of paintings and sculptural works that refer to the taxonomic impulse—the desire to organize the overwhelming variety of nature by means of classification systems of naming and identification. Morphologically generic migratory songbirds, fashion-model monkeys, neon-hued amphibians, and fungus specimens are represented in a narrow variety of historical styles, from loose painterly flourishes to a tight, illustrational style that might have been used by an artist-naturalist in the late 19th century. Other paintings use compositional and narrative motifs to refer to fashion or product photography, and are intended to be digitalized for distribution as photographic reproductions or on the Internet, while cast-resin botanical specimens mimic both natural history and retail display. Allegorical animal and plant specimens sport the colors of our globalized economy, from the day-glow hues of package design to the pixilated palettes of television and the Internet, as well as the colors of nationalist identity and political affiliation; an imagined nature’s literal embodiment of contemporary conditions.  Color functions as a metaphor for the taxonomies of the global marketplace, where everything is available in every color, color is both seduction and signage, and the comfortable rectangles through which we are accustomed to view the world—paintings, photographs, television screens and computer monitors—contain a dazzling array of “specimens” from across the globe, brought together for a new narrative of a “natural” world.