Monday, September 28th 2020

Alexis Rockman

The artist :

He is an American contemporary artist. He was born in New York, in 1962, so he is 58 years old. His mother worked in the American Museum of New York so he very often visited it. He is known / famous for his paintings of futuristic landscapes that could one day exist due to climate change.

He belongs to an artistic movement called the New Gothic.

His stepfather was Australian so he lived in Australia with his family.

He collaborated with scientists. In his life, he travelled a lot, for example, he went to Costa Rica, Madagascar and Antarctica.

He is married and he lives in Connecticut, USA.

He wrote books. He attended an art school and he received a BFA, an award. He was interested in science, natural history and art in general. He illustrated the consequences of the industrial revolution.

=> In a biography, we use the past. But if the person is still alive, we sometimes use the present.

 => To conjugate a regular verb in the past, I add -ED to the verb or in the case of irregular verbs, I resort to the second column (wrote / was)

His art :

Where ? It’s in a zoo in the Bronx, in New York, an ill-famed place.

When ? It was painted between 2012 and 2013.

Who ? What ? We can see wild animals coming from different continents. (a polar bear, a tiger, an elephant, a jellyfish, parrots, a hippopotamus (a hippo), a panda, a monkey, birds, a flamingo, a crocodile / an alligator, an okapi, a dog…

Why ? How ? What happened ? These animals are out of their cages, so there has been a problem… The zoo was abandonned and the animals got free… Maybe humans being disappeared and animals took back their rights. Maybe someone just opened all the cages… Maybe a tsunami on NYC flooded the city and the zoo and the cages opened… The impact of climate change is visible in the warm waters where jellyfish swim, there’s moss everywhere, so this looks like a tropical climate. NYC is rather in an oceanical climate, with warm summers and cold winters (snow storms, hurricanes)

The message from the artist :

Alexis Rockman might be saying that animals could be better without human beings… he might also be saying that this could be the consequences of global warming… Or he is showing an apocalytic scene to mean what could happen in the future if we don’t take care of the Earth…

This painting can be compared to a Utopian work because all the animals are out of their cages… yet it is a Dystopian painting because even if they are out of their cages, they are still fighting each other, they are not adapted to the environment and they are still in a city. We can still understand / decipher it is NYC even though nature has started to overwhelm the buildings. The presence of human beings can be felt and they do nothing for the zoo to be rehabilitated.