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Animal Beings
Given my fascination with evolution and its driving force, the animal sujets are another approach to this subject.
In the animal world replication is limited by the supply of energy, which is not always just food, and the limitations imposed by their competitor of furhered by their synergistic partner. Under typical conditions animal forms are in balance with their natural environment. This balance is only brought out of equilibrium through an atypical external impact on the system, such as the weather - or man.
Evolutionary improvements of species within such balanced systems affects the effectiveness and efficiency in using the given energy supplies. But these systems may change in their composition and relationship to one another, but, with one exception, they will never endanger the planet as a whole, and thereby affecting life on this planet. The level of destruction is also limited. Only the human animal is capable of and is prepared to unitiate unlimited destruction of all life forms.
Despite the fact that there remain as yet some unexplained gaps in the evolutionary path, it is clearly a continuous progression of species in their use of energy sources and in their social behaviour, be it forms competition or symbiosis. Humans clearly appear as an abberation in this continuum of evolution; an abberation that has allowed the human species to expand its territory at a rate that appears as a step change in evolution, and as an external impact on the balanced systems in nature. It also appears as the only life form that is not able to maintain a homeostatis without an external impact. I challenge a biologist to contradict that.
In my work I therefore reflect animals, reduced to their essential and idiosyncratic features, in balance within their natural environment; those features, which are necessary to clearly identify the animal, but no more. The environments, too, are reduced to essential visual and compositional elements. Animals cleary possess individual character traits, i.e. personalities. The reductions in their physical appearance allows me to bring these character traits to the forground and thereby raise their deserved position next to the human and to question the human claim to the pinnacle of evolution.