Artist’s Statement










Out of some dark forest under some ancient dawn there must come towards us, with lumbering yet dancing motions, one of the very queerest of the prehistoric creatures. We must see for the first time the strangely small head set on a neck not only longer but thicker than itself, as the face of a gargoyle is thrust out upon a gutter-spout, the one disproportionate crest of hair running along the ridge of that heavy neck like a beard in the wrong place; the feet, each like a solid club of horn, alone amid the feet of so many cattle; so that the true fear is to be found in showing, not the cloven, but the uncloven hoof. Nor is it mere verbal fancy to see him thus as a unique monster; for in a sense a monster means what is unique, and he is really unique.


G.K. Chesterton

 


  2. The Creatures Among Us

  3. by Steven David Johnson


  5. In his essay "Naming and Being," novelist Walker Percy writes that names may either reveal or obscure. What happens conceptually when you see a bright flash and a movement of wings in a tree? What happens in the moment right before you think to yourself "Oh ... it's just a sparrow?" For a split second, you are seeing the world with fresh eyes. Then the word "sparrow" cloaks the experience with its deadening familiarity: "Just a sparrow". The name hides the beast. The symbol is obscured and we become alienated from our world.


  7. This fall, I spent an hour at a friend's house using a macro lens to photograph insects crawling across a stained glass window. I loved watching the delicate six-legged bodies color-drenched in the filtered sunlight. A tiny magical world materialized in my viewfinder. The highlight occurred when a ladybug reared up on its two hind legs to begin its climb from the sill to the window frame. For just a split second, she became a ballet dancer on a stage, blue and red lights tracing the outline of her elegant form. I was in the presence of the unfamiliar and the achingly beautiful, not "just a ladybug". For a brief moment, I could see.


  9. For Percy, recovery of the symbol may come through the process of ordeal. "If I am lying wounded or in exile or in prison and a sparrow builds his nest at my window, then I may see the sparrow." In a less extreme way, recovery may also come through the experience of engaging with art. In "The Creatures Among Us," I photographically re-imagine domesticated and other common creatures that have become invisible through proximity. I am interested in exploring how art might aid in the recovery of the obscured symbol and ultimately how art might participate in the reversal of alienation.


  11. Percy sees the artist's role in our age as a type of diagnostician of the soul. The self alienated from the created world and indeed from its own consciousness, is the self in despair. The alienated self cannot dig its way out through technological rationalism or irrational consumerism.  However, art may aid in a type of spiritual recovery. Semiotic scholar, Umberto Eco writes, "...poetry might reveal the nature of things with an intensity and breadth lacking in rational thought." Percy elaborates, "If [s]he is a good poet and names something which we secretly and privately know but have not named, we rejoice at the naming and say, 'Yes! I know what you mean!' Once again we are co-celebrants of being." For Percy, a Catholic, the idea of co-celebration likely had special meaning. When we celebrate meaning with a shared symbol system that reveals rather than obscures, we are participating in a type of sacrament, a communion that releases us from estrangement.


  13. It is the artist who at his best reverses the alienating process by the very act of seeing it clearly for what it is and naming it, and who in this act establishes a kind of community. It is a paradoxical community whose members are both alone yet not alone, who strive to become themselves and discover that there are others who, however tentatively, have undertaken the same quest (Signposts in a Strange Land 151).


  15. If, as the old saw says, familiarity breeds contempt, and if contempt is a form of alienation, then some sort of reconciliation and recovery of wonder might come from the process of defamiliarization. Sometimes this process can happen by moving further away and looking back again, as when Bilbo leaves the Shire on a quest and returns to his home with an expanded sense of its importance in the history of Middle Earth. But defamiliarization may also happen by moving in even closer. Chuck Close's paintings, by magnifying the human subject to gargantuan proportions, throws us off kilter, forcing us to confront the old portrait genre in a new way. My animal photographs operate in a similar way: pulling in close, cropping and decontextualizing the subject. I am interested in recovering a sense of wonder at the commonplace, framing the subject in such a way that it becomes impossible to sum up the subject at a glance.


  17. When a chicken is depicted in such a way that its most easily recognizable features are obscured, when it is removed from its domestic context, it no longer appears to be the tame animal of the roost. Rather, it looks dangerous, a raptor, a bird of prey ... sharp-beaked and prehistoric. During a contemplative retreat in Oregon this past summer, my family and I shared the property with a group of chickens. Not much taller than the feathered beasts, my two tiny daughters had a healthy respect for the creatures. Later, as my nearly three-year-old daughter Eliza was frolicking through the pine forests of the Cascades, she claimed she was "wild like the chickens." I think she was seeing truly.


  19. The process of defamiliarization continues in the titling of the work. Percy, trained as medical doctor, wrote, "I am more satisfied to be given a name, even though the name may mean nothing, than to be given a scientific classification." However, I've found that some of the old Latin names are truly wonderful and move beyond mere description. For the layperson, scientific names move us out of the realm of the familiar. It is easy to dismiss the chicken. But what of Gallus gallus? Or the archetypal Bos taurus bellowing out from an ancient mythological world? The Genus name Harmonia aptly describes the elegant unity of the Asian ladybeetle, and Canis familiaris ironically distances us from the word dog while itself containing reference to the familiar.


  21. I want the viewers of my work to experience the G.K. Chesterton moment ... to experience these creatures for the first time as magical beasts wandering out of ancient dawn. To continue with Chesterton's thoughts at the beginning of this essay, if we truly see a horse for the first time, we may also enter the mystery of what it means for humans to relate to animals. We may even start to recover the wonder of what it means to be namers and symbol users, the enigma of what it means to be human.


  23. But the point is that when we thus see him as the first man saw him, we begin once more to have some imaginative sense of what it meant when the first man rode him.  In such a dream he may seem ugly, but he does not seem unimpressive; and certainly that two-legged dwarf who could get on top of him will not seem unimpressive. By a longer and more erratic road we shall come back to the same marvel of the man and the horse; and the marvel will be, if possible, even more marvellous.  We shall have again a glimpse of St. George; the more glorious because St. George is not riding on the horse, but rather riding on the dragon.


  25. G.K. Chesterton











  36. Bibliography


  38. Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. "The Everlasting Man. "

  39. http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/pgaus/0100311.txt

  40. (31 Oct. 2005).


  42. Percy, Walker. Lost in the Cosmos. New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1984.


  44. Percy, Walker. Signposts in a Strange Land. New York: Picador, 2000.