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RUI PIMENTA
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PAUL MORSTAD
Using maps, artifacts of human endeavour, allows me to reveal the ambivalences and struggles at the heart of our cohabitation with the natural world and to engage with
our efforts to devise an empirical grid to interpret/represent the land, to impose a
measure of order onto an otherwise-organized natural world.
The dendritic process that leads me from one painting to the next is mostly inspired by
the old charts and abandoned objects I come across as well as the challenges I
encounter in the act of painting a given piece. This process allows me a broader
exploration of the themes of migration, encroachment, ecological decay and
extirpation. I am interested in the obfuscating of the map or chart, in the visual
reciprocity and tension at play between the zoological images emerging from the map
and the map itself, and ultimately in arriving at a form of interspecies
counter-mapping. This “response” mapping asks a number of questions, one of which
could be, if sandhill cranes could make a map, what might it look like?
The content of my work is deeply inspired and informed by the natural sciences. The
pieces and their animal elements find their aesthetic roots in the long-standing
tradition of wildlife art: past naturalist–artists like John James Audubon and James
Fenwick Lansdowne, naturalist–explorer Friedrich von Humboldt, and contemporary
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