Alexis Rockman
Encyclopedia
Alexis Rockman is an American
contemporary art
ist known for his paintings that provide rich depictions of future landscapes as they might exist with impacts of climate change
and evolution influenced by genetic engineering
. He has exhibited his work in the United States
since 1985
, including a 2004 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum
, and internationally since 1989
. Alexis Rockman lives in New York City
, and works out of a studio in the city's TriBeCa
neighborhood.
. Rockman's stepfather, an Australian jazz musician, brought the family to Australia frequently. As a child, Rockman frequented the American Museum of Natural History
in New York City, where his mother, Diana Wall, worked for anthropologist Margaret Mead
. Rockman has a particular fascination with cockroach
es and rats, and admires their ability to shadow human civilization.
Growing up, Rockman had an interest in Natural History and Science, and developed fascination for film, animation, and the arts. From 1980 to 1982, Rockman studied animation at the Rhode Island School of Design
, and continued art studies at the School of Visual Arts
in Manhattan
, receiving a BFA in fine arts in 1985.
Aside from his art career, Rockman has taken on requests from conservation groups, including the Riverkeeper
project, which has fought against pollution of the Hudson River
. He lives in the West Village with his partner, Dorothy Spears, and her two sons, Alex and Ferran Brown.
in 1988. Rockman also had exhibitions at galleries in Los Angeles
, Boston
, and Philadelphia in the late 1980s. In Phylum, Rockman draws upon the work of Ernst Haeckel
, a proponent of Darwinism
. In 1992, Rockman painted his first mural, Evolution.
A series of works by Rockman in the early 1990s, including Barnyard Scene (1990), Jungle Fever (1991), The Trough (1992), and Biosphere: Laboratory (1993), use dark humor in depicting different species mating with one another. In Barnyard Scene, Rockman depicts a raccoon
mating with a rooster
, and Jungle Fever shows a praying mantis mating with a chipmunk
. In the Biosphere series of paintings, Rockman alludes to the Biosphere 2
project in Arizona
and envisions a situation where the Earth has become too toxic for human life, so life only exists in strangely mutated forms inside geodesic-dome structures. Biosphere draws references from science fiction cinema, particularly the opening scene of the 1971 film Silent Running
, as well as Stanley Kubrick
's 2001, and Ridley Scott
's Alien. Biosphere: The Ocean (1994), influenced by H. R. Giger
's work, depicts a shark with a long, bionic sawfish
beak, suited for tearing through its food.
In 1993, Rockman created Still Life, a still life
depiction of a pile of fish and marine specimens, evoking reference to 1935 horror James Whale
film Bride of Frankenstein
and films by Luis Buñuel
. In Still Life, Rockman alludes to the Wunderkammer, placing "aberrant contents" amidst a Baroque
still life scene, which traditionally is abundant with wealth and goods from Dutch and Spanish colonies.
, Brazil
, Madagascar
, Guyana
, Tasmania
, and Antarctica. Rockman traveled to Guyana
in 1994 with fellow artist Mark Dion, resulting in numerous paintings of the flora and fauna that he observed. For the 1994 trip, he strictly painted works that depicted what he saw, with particular interest in various types of insects. Neblina (1995), one of the last works resulting from the Guyana trip, was painted after the collapse of a tailings
dam at the Omni gold mine in Guyana, resulting in cyanide
leaking into the waterway. Neblina shows wildlife huddled together high in tree branches. Rockman returned to Guyana in 1998, and his works from that trip focused on aspects of ecotourism
. Rockman traveled to Antarctica in 2008 with Dorothy Spears, and works resulting from this voyage were featured in the "Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape" exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
.
Rockman's painting The Farm was exhibited at the Exit Art Gallery in New York City in 2000, as part of the "Paradise Now" exhibition. The work depicts various animals and plants in a soybean field, and how they may appear in the future, as a result of genetic engineering. For this work, Rockman consulted with molecular biologist Rob DeSalle at the American Museum of Natural History. "The Farm" lead to a residency and a body of work of four other 8x10' paintings called "Wonderful World", which was shown at the Camden Art Center in London in 2004.
featured Manifest Destiny, an 8-by-24-foot oil-on-wood mural by Rockman as a centerpiece for the second-floor Mezzanine Gallery and marking the opening of the renovated Grand Lobby and plaza at the museum. Manifest Destiny portrays the Brooklyn waterfront amidst tropical vegetation and absent any humans, in the year 5004, after climate change has caused catastrophic sea level rise. Rockman sketched out initial ideas for the mural in January 2000, and Brooklyn Museum director Arnold L. Lehman officially commissioned the mural in 2002. Rockman began work on the mural in March 2003, consulting with experts in various fields, including Peter Ward and scientists at Columbia University
's Goddard Institute for Space Studies
, as well as architects Diane Lewis and Chris Morris. Rockman shows the outcome 3000 years in the future, depicting tropical plants, mutated fish and sea creatures glowing with radioactivity amidst the ruins of buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge
, the wrecks of a Dutch sailing ship and a 20th-century submarine. Rockman's project suggests what the remote geological, botanical, and zoological future might bring, predicting the ecosystem
of the area thousands of years ahead. This mural was exhibited from April 2004–September 2004 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
featured works by Rockman and Tony Matelli in the 2007 exhibition, "Baroque Biology". In Romantic Attachments, Rockman portrays, in an allegorical manner, a male Homo georgicus
together with a female human in a romantic encounter. The Homo georgicus dates from 1.8 million years ago, intermediate in the evolutionary timeline between Homo habilis
and H. erectus
. In Romantic Attachments, Rockman references Gian Lorenzo Bernini
's sculpture Ecstasy of Saint Theresa
, depicting the torch-bearing male Homo georgicus in place of Bernini's spear-bearing male angel towering over a female, who in both Bernini's and Rockman's work is portrayed in a sexual manner. Sculptor and paleoartist Viktor Deak created two reference models for Rockman of a male Homo georgicus.
The exhibition, the first to survey Rockman's career, presented 47 paintings and works on paper by Rockman. The title of the exhibition refers to the title of the first chapter of Rachel Carson
's book Silent Spring
.. As of Autumn Quarter 2011, this exhibition is currently being hosted at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, which previously hosted prints of Evolution and Manifest Destiny.
, and identifies his work as pop art
, "using natural history as his iconography
". Rockman has sometimes been associated with a New Gothic Art
movement.
artists portrayed American landscapes, in a utopian way, as a haven for Europeans escaping oppression. Rockman turns this idea upside down, depicting apocalyptic scenes, while incorporating realism
of the Hudson River School. Influences include Albert Bierstadt
's Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, which depicts landscapes of the western United States
before the culmination of Manifest Destiny
when railroads linked the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Hudson River School artists Thomas Cole
and Frederic Edwin Church
also inspired Rockman, particularly Cole's painting The Course of Empire – Desolation.
Other early influences for Rockman included the artwork and diorama
s featured at the American Museum of Natural History. He has also spent extensive time studying old field guides and other such material.
, designer for the film Blade Runner
, fantasy art and science fiction illustrator Chesley Bonestell
, and Jan Švankmajer
; stop motion
animators including Willis O'Brien
, Ray Harryhausen
, Brothers Quay
; and various Eastern European avant-garde
filmmakers. Jonathan Crary, Columbia University
professor, sees similarities between Rockman and artists Piero di Cosimo
, Albrecht Altdorfer
, Edward Hicks
, Theodore Rousseau
, Joan Miró
(The Ploughed Field or The Hunter), and Yves Tanguy
. Crary notes how Rockman combines imaginary and visionary portrayal in an allegorical manner with scientific basis, study of the natural world, and experimental hypothesis.
magazine illustration Atom Bombing of New York City, which depicts Manhattan
amidst destruction and a glowing orange aura of an atomic bomb.
People that have influenced Rockman include Stephen Jay Gould, whom Rockman met and later wrote two essays about Rockman's work for the monograph published by Monacelli Press. Charles R. Knight
has a special place in Rockman's development, as he almost single-handedly created the genre of reconstructions of extinct ecosystems.
Some of Rockman's more recent works, including paintings featured in the 2008 Rose Art Museum exhibition, featured a more semi-abstract style than some of Rockman's earlier work that give traditional representation, creating some tension between the styles. In reviewing Rockman's 2008 Rose Art Museum
exhibition, "The Weight of Air", The Boston Globe
art critic Sebastian Smee describes Rockman's work as exhibiting a clash of abstract and his earlier styles, producing "a kind of distraction – a desire in the mind's eye to marry them that is continually frustrated," he though praised Rockman for taking on such subject matter. While Smee found some of Rockman's work overly jarring with clashing styles, Smee praised other pieces, including Wind Regime (2007), describing it as a "stunning painting".
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
contemporary art
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
ist known for his paintings that provide rich depictions of future landscapes as they might exist with impacts of climate change
Climate change
Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions or the distribution of events around that average...
and evolution influenced by genetic engineering
Genetic engineering
Genetic engineering, also called genetic modification, is the direct human manipulation of an organism's genome using modern DNA technology. It involves the introduction of foreign DNA or synthetic genes into the organism of interest...
. He has exhibited his work in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
since 1985
1985 in art
-Events:*Charles Saatchi's collection opens to the public, arousing interest in Neo-expressionism-Awards:*Archibald Prize: Guy Warren – Flugelman with Wingman*Turner Prize – Howard Hodgkin-Works:*Wayne Thiebaud – Sunset Streets...
, including a 2004 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an encyclopedia art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum holds New York City's second largest art collection with roughly 1.5 million works....
, and internationally since 1989
1989 in art
-Events:*12 June – Corcoran Gallery of Art removes Robert Mapplethorpe's photography exhibition.*The Keith Haring Foundation is established.-Exhibitions:*Jim Dine Drawings 1973–1987 at Minneapolis Institute of Art...
. Alexis Rockman lives in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, and works out of a studio in the city's TriBeCa
TriBeCa
Tribeca is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York in the United States. Its name is an acronym based on the words "Triangle below Canal Street", and is properly bounded by Canal Street, West Street, Broadway, and Vesey Street...
neighborhood.
Life
Rockman was born and grew up in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. Rockman's stepfather, an Australian jazz musician, brought the family to Australia frequently. As a child, Rockman frequented the American Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
in New York City, where his mother, Diana Wall, worked for anthropologist Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s....
. Rockman has a particular fascination with cockroach
Cockroach
Cockroaches are insects of the order Blattaria or Blattodea, of which about 30 species out of 4,500 total are associated with human habitations...
es and rats, and admires their ability to shadow human civilization.
Growing up, Rockman had an interest in Natural History and Science, and developed fascination for film, animation, and the arts. From 1980 to 1982, Rockman studied animation at the Rhode Island School of Design
Rhode Island School of Design
Rhode Island School of Design is a fine arts and design college located in Providence, Rhode Island. It was founded in 1877. Located at the base of College Hill, the RISD campus is contiguous with the Brown University campus. The two institutions share social, academic, and community resources and...
, and continued art studies at the School of Visual Arts
School of Visual Arts
The School of Visual Arts , is a proprietary art school located in Manhattan, New York City, and is widely considered to be one of the leading art schools in the United States. It was established in 1947 by co-founders Silas H. Rhodes and Burne Hogarth as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and...
in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
, receiving a BFA in fine arts in 1985.
Aside from his art career, Rockman has taken on requests from conservation groups, including the Riverkeeper
Riverkeeper
Riverkeeper is an environmental non-profit organization dedicated to the protection of the Hudson River and its tributaries, as well as the watersheds that provide New York City with its drinking water...
project, which has fought against pollution of the Hudson River
Hudson River
The Hudson is a river that flows from north to south through eastern New York. The highest official source is at Lake Tear of the Clouds, on the slopes of Mount Marcy in the Adirondack Mountains. The river itself officially begins in Henderson Lake in Newcomb, New York...
. He lives in the West Village with his partner, Dorothy Spears, and her two sons, Alex and Ferran Brown.
Early career 1985–1993
In the mid and late-1980s, Rockman began exhibiting his work at the Jay Gorney Modern Art Gallery in New York City in the East Village and relocated to SoHoSoHo
SoHo is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City, notable for being the location of many artists' lofts and art galleries, and also, more recently, for the wide variety of stores and shops ranging from trendy boutiques to outlets of upscale national and international chain stores...
in 1988. Rockman also had exhibitions at galleries in Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
, Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
, and Philadelphia in the late 1980s. In Phylum, Rockman draws upon the work of Ernst Haeckel
Ernst Haeckel
The "European War" became known as "The Great War", and it was not until 1920, in the book "The First World War 1914-1918" by Charles à Court Repington, that the term "First World War" was used as the official name for the conflict.-Research:...
, a proponent of Darwinism
Darwinism
Darwinism is a set of movements and concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or of evolution, including some ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin....
. In 1992, Rockman painted his first mural, Evolution.
A series of works by Rockman in the early 1990s, including Barnyard Scene (1990), Jungle Fever (1991), The Trough (1992), and Biosphere: Laboratory (1993), use dark humor in depicting different species mating with one another. In Barnyard Scene, Rockman depicts a raccoon
Raccoon
Procyon is a genus of nocturnal mammals, comprising three species commonly known as raccoons, in the family Procyonidae. The most familiar species, the common raccoon , is often known simply as "the" raccoon, as the two other raccoon species in the genus are native only to the tropics and are...
mating with a rooster
Rooster
A rooster, also known as a cockerel, cock or chanticleer, is a male chicken with the female being called a hen. Immature male chickens of less than a year's age are called cockerels...
, and Jungle Fever shows a praying mantis mating with a chipmunk
Chipmunk
Chipmunks are small striped squirrels native to North America and Asia. They are usually classed either as a single genus with three subgenera, or as three genera.-Etymology and taxonomy:...
. In the Biosphere series of paintings, Rockman alludes to the Biosphere 2
Biosphere 2
Biosphere 2 is a structure originally built to be an artificial, materially-closed ecological system in Oracle, Arizona by Space Biosphere Ventures, a joint venture whose principal officers were John P. Allen, inventor and Executive Director, and Margret Augustine, CEO...
project in Arizona
Arizona
Arizona ; is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States. It is also part of the western United States and the mountain west. The capital and largest city is Phoenix...
and envisions a situation where the Earth has become too toxic for human life, so life only exists in strangely mutated forms inside geodesic-dome structures. Biosphere draws references from science fiction cinema, particularly the opening scene of the 1971 film Silent Running
Silent Running
Silent Running is a 1972 environmentally themed science fiction film starring Bruce Dern and directed by Douglas Trumbull, who had previously worked as a special effects supervisor on such science fiction films as 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Andromeda Strain.-Plot summary:Silent Running depicts a...
, as well as Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...
's 2001, and Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott
Sir Ridley Scott is an English film director and producer. His most famous films include The Duellists , Alien , Blade Runner , Legend , Thelma & Louise , G. I...
's Alien. Biosphere: The Ocean (1994), influenced by H. R. Giger
H. R. Giger
Hans Rudolf "Ruedi" Giger is a Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor, and set designer. He won an Academy Award for Best Achievement for Visual Effects for his design work on the film Alien.-Early life:...
's work, depicts a shark with a long, bionic sawfish
Sawfish
Sawfish, also known as the Carpenter Shark, are a family of rays, characterized by a long, toothy nose extension snout. Several species can grow to approximately . The family as a whole is largely unknown and little studied...
beak, suited for tearing through its food.
In 1993, Rockman created Still Life, a still life
Still life
A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural or man-made...
depiction of a pile of fish and marine specimens, evoking reference to 1935 horror James Whale
James Whale
James Whale was an English film director, theatre director and actor. He is best remembered for his work in the horror film genre, having directed such classics as Frankenstein , The Old Dark House , The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein...
film Bride of Frankenstein
Bride of Frankenstein
Bride of Frankenstein is a 1935 American horror film, the first sequel to Frankenstein...
and films by Luis Buñuel
Luis Buñuel
Luis Buñuel Portolés was a Spanish-born filmmaker — later a naturalized citizen of Mexico — who worked in Spain, Mexico, France and the US..-Early years:...
. In Still Life, Rockman alludes to the Wunderkammer, placing "aberrant contents" amidst a Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
still life scene, which traditionally is abundant with wealth and goods from Dutch and Spanish colonies.
Travels
Many of Alexis Rockman's works have been inspired by his travels around the world, including to Costa RicaCosta Rica
Costa Rica , officially the Republic of Costa Rica is a multilingual, multiethnic and multicultural country in Central America, bordered by Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the southeast, the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Caribbean Sea to the east....
, Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
, Madagascar
Madagascar
The Republic of Madagascar is an island country located in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa...
, Guyana
Guyana
Guyana , officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, previously the colony of British Guiana, is a sovereign state on the northern coast of South America that is culturally part of the Anglophone Caribbean. Guyana was a former colony of the Dutch and of the British...
, Tasmania
Tasmania
Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...
, and Antarctica. Rockman traveled to Guyana
Guyana
Guyana , officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, previously the colony of British Guiana, is a sovereign state on the northern coast of South America that is culturally part of the Anglophone Caribbean. Guyana was a former colony of the Dutch and of the British...
in 1994 with fellow artist Mark Dion, resulting in numerous paintings of the flora and fauna that he observed. For the 1994 trip, he strictly painted works that depicted what he saw, with particular interest in various types of insects. Neblina (1995), one of the last works resulting from the Guyana trip, was painted after the collapse of a tailings
Tailings
Tailings, also called mine dumps, slimes, tails, leach residue, or slickens, are the materials left over after the process of separating the valuable fraction from the uneconomic fraction of an ore...
dam at the Omni gold mine in Guyana, resulting in cyanide
Cyanide
A cyanide is a chemical compound that contains the cyano group, -C≡N, which consists of a carbon atom triple-bonded to a nitrogen atom. Cyanides most commonly refer to salts of the anion CN−. Most cyanides are highly toxic....
leaking into the waterway. Neblina shows wildlife huddled together high in tree branches. Rockman returned to Guyana in 1998, and his works from that trip focused on aspects of ecotourism
Ecotourism
Ecotourism is a form of tourism visiting fragile, pristine, and usually protected areas, intended as a low impact and often small scale alternative to standard commercial tourism...
. Rockman traveled to Antarctica in 2008 with Dorothy Spears, and works resulting from this voyage were featured in the "Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape" exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, commonly referred to as MASS MoCA, is a museum in a converted factory building located in North Adams, Massachusetts, USA. It is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art and performing arts in the country.MASS MoCA opened with 19...
.
Future Evolution and Wonderful World 2000–2004
Rockman's interest in science lead to a book collaboration with scientist and author Peter Douglass Ward called "Future Evolution", which was published in 2001. Rockman and Ward collaborated, with Ward writing the text and Rockman creating the images. Rockman and Ward portray the future as abundant with plants and animals, but they are descendants of weedy species or feral domestics.Rockman's painting The Farm was exhibited at the Exit Art Gallery in New York City in 2000, as part of the "Paradise Now" exhibition. The work depicts various animals and plants in a soybean field, and how they may appear in the future, as a result of genetic engineering. For this work, Rockman consulted with molecular biologist Rob DeSalle at the American Museum of Natural History. "The Farm" lead to a residency and a body of work of four other 8x10' paintings called "Wonderful World", which was shown at the Camden Art Center in London in 2004.
Manifest Destiny 2004
In 2004, the Brooklyn MuseumBrooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an encyclopedia art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum holds New York City's second largest art collection with roughly 1.5 million works....
featured Manifest Destiny, an 8-by-24-foot oil-on-wood mural by Rockman as a centerpiece for the second-floor Mezzanine Gallery and marking the opening of the renovated Grand Lobby and plaza at the museum. Manifest Destiny portrays the Brooklyn waterfront amidst tropical vegetation and absent any humans, in the year 5004, after climate change has caused catastrophic sea level rise. Rockman sketched out initial ideas for the mural in January 2000, and Brooklyn Museum director Arnold L. Lehman officially commissioned the mural in 2002. Rockman began work on the mural in March 2003, consulting with experts in various fields, including Peter Ward and scientists at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
's Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Goddard Institute for Space Studies
The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies , at Columbia University in New York City, is a component laboratory of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Earth-Sun Exploration Division and a unit of The Earth Institute at Columbia University...
, as well as architects Diane Lewis and Chris Morris. Rockman shows the outcome 3000 years in the future, depicting tropical plants, mutated fish and sea creatures glowing with radioactivity amidst the ruins of buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge
Brooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States. Completed in 1883, it connects the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn by spanning the East River...
, the wrecks of a Dutch sailing ship and a 20th-century submarine. Rockman's project suggests what the remote geological, botanical, and zoological future might bring, predicting the ecosystem
Ecosystem
An ecosystem is a biological environment consisting of all the organisms living in a particular area, as well as all the nonliving , physical components of the environment with which the organisms interact, such as air, soil, water and sunlight....
of the area thousands of years ahead. This mural was exhibited from April 2004–September 2004 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Baroque Biology 2007
Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts CenterContemporary Arts Center
The Contemporary Arts Center is a pioneering contemporary art museum located in Cincinnati, Ohio. The CAC is a non-collecting museum that focuses on new developments in painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, performance art and new media...
featured works by Rockman and Tony Matelli in the 2007 exhibition, "Baroque Biology". In Romantic Attachments, Rockman portrays, in an allegorical manner, a male Homo georgicus
Homo georgicus
Homo georgicus is a species of Homo that was suggested in 2002 to describe fossil skulls and jaws found in Dmanisi, Georgia in 1999 and 2001, which seem intermediate between Homo habilis and H. erectus. A partial skeleton was discovered in 2001. The fossils are about 1.8 million years old...
together with a female human in a romantic encounter. The Homo georgicus dates from 1.8 million years ago, intermediate in the evolutionary timeline between Homo habilis
Homo habilis
Homo habilis is a species of the genus Homo, which lived from approximately at the beginning of the Pleistocene period. The discovery and description of this species is credited to both Mary and Louis Leakey, who found fossils in Tanzania, East Africa, between 1962 and 1964. Homo habilis Homo...
and H. erectus
Homo erectus
Homo erectus is an extinct species of hominid that lived from the end of the Pliocene epoch to the later Pleistocene, about . The species originated in Africa and spread as far as India, China and Java. There is still disagreement on the subject of the classification, ancestry, and progeny of H...
. In Romantic Attachments, Rockman references Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Gian Lorenzo Bernini was an Italian artist who worked principally in Rome. He was the leading sculptor of his age and also a prominent architect...
's sculpture Ecstasy of Saint Theresa
Ecstasy of Saint Theresa
Ecstasy of Saint Theresa is a Czech band formed in 1990 by Jan Muchow, Jan Gregar, Petr Wegner and Irna Libowitz. Early shoegaze influences included Siouxsie and the Banshees, Cocteau Twins, and My Bloody Valentine....
, depicting the torch-bearing male Homo georgicus in place of Bernini's spear-bearing male angel towering over a female, who in both Bernini's and Rockman's work is portrayed in a sexual manner. Sculptor and paleoartist Viktor Deak created two reference models for Rockman of a male Homo georgicus.
Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition
From November 2010 to May 8, 2011, Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow, was featured at the Smithsonian American Art MuseumSmithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is a museum in Washington, D.C. with an extensive collection of American art.Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum has a broad variety of American art that covers all regions and art movements found in the United States...
The exhibition, the first to survey Rockman's career, presented 47 paintings and works on paper by Rockman. The title of the exhibition refers to the title of the first chapter of Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson
Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist and conservationist whose writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement....
's book Silent Spring
Silent Spring
Silent Spring is a book written by Rachel Carson and published by Houghton Mifflin on 27 September 1962. The book is widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement....
.. As of Autumn Quarter 2011, this exhibition is currently being hosted at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, which previously hosted prints of Evolution and Manifest Destiny.
Style
In his work, Rockman uses the language of natural history to examine our relationship to it as a culture. He draws influence from the 19th century Hudson River SchoolHudson River school
The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism...
, and identifies his work as pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
, "using natural history as his iconography
Iconography
Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing", and comes from the Greek "image" and "to write". A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the...
". Rockman has sometimes been associated with a New Gothic Art
New Gothic Art
-Manifesto:The Neo Gothic Art Manifesto was written by gothic artist Charles Moffat in 2001, who also coined the term "Neo Gothic" in an effort to differentiate it from gothic architecture...
movement.
Hudson River School
Hudson River SchoolHudson River school
The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism...
artists portrayed American landscapes, in a utopian way, as a haven for Europeans escaping oppression. Rockman turns this idea upside down, depicting apocalyptic scenes, while incorporating realism
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
of the Hudson River School. Influences include Albert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. In obtaining the subject matter for these works, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion...
's Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, which depicts landscapes of the western United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
before the culmination of Manifest Destiny
Manifest Destiny
Manifest Destiny was the 19th century American belief that the United States was destined to expand across the continent. It was used by Democrat-Republicans in the 1840s to justify the war with Mexico; the concept was denounced by Whigs, and fell into disuse after the mid-19th century.Advocates of...
when railroads linked the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Hudson River School artists Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole was an English-born American artist. He is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century...
and Frederic Edwin Church
Frederic Edwin Church
Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters...
also inspired Rockman, particularly Cole's painting The Course of Empire – Desolation.
Other early influences for Rockman included the artwork and diorama
Diorama
The word diorama can either refer to a nineteenth century mobile theatre device, or, in modern usage, a three-dimensional full-size or miniature model, sometimes enclosed in a glass showcase for a museum...
s featured at the American Museum of Natural History. He has also spent extensive time studying old field guides and other such material.
Film and animation
Rockman also draws some influence from film and animation, and has admiration for the work of various film designers, particularly the science fiction genre. Rockman admires the work of Syd MeadSyd Mead
Sydney Jay Mead, commonly Syd Mead, is a "visual futurist" and concept artist. He is best known for his designs for science-fiction films such as Blade Runner, Aliens and Tron...
, designer for the film Blade Runner
Blade Runner
Blade Runner is a 1982 American science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and Sean Young. The screenplay, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, is loosely based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K...
, fantasy art and science fiction illustrator Chesley Bonestell
Chesley Bonestell
Chesley Bonestell was an American painter, designer and illustrator. His paintings were a major influence on science fiction art and illustration, and he helped inspire the American space program...
, and Jan Švankmajer
Jan Švankmajer
Jan Švankmajer is a Czech filmmaker and artist whose work spans several media. He is a self-labeled surrealist known for his surreal animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the Brothers Quay, and many others.- Life and career :Jan...
; stop motion
Stop motion
Stop motion is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence...
animators including Willis O'Brien
Willis O'Brien
Willis Harold O'Brien was an Irish American pioneering motion picture special effects artist who perfected and specialized in stop-motion animation. He was affectionately known to his family and close friends as "Obie"....
, Ray Harryhausen
Ray Harryhausen
Ray Harryhausen is an American film producer and special effects creator...
, Brothers Quay
Brothers Quay
Stephen and Timothy Quay are American identical twin brothers better known as the Brothers Quay or Quay Brothers. They are influential stop-motion animators...
; and various Eastern European avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
filmmakers. Jonathan Crary, Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
professor, sees similarities between Rockman and artists Piero di Cosimo
Piero di Cosimo
Piero di Cosimo , also known as Piero di Lorenzo, was an Italian Renaissance painter.-Biography:The son of a goldsmith, Piero was born in Florence and apprenticed under the artist Cosimo Rosseli, from whom he derived his popular name and whom he assisted in the painting of the Sistine Chapel in...
, Albrecht Altdorfer
Albrecht Altdorfer
Albrecht Altdorfer was a German painter, printmaker and architect of the Renaissance era.-Biography:Altdorfer was born in Regensburg or Altdorf around 1480....
, Edward Hicks
Edward Hicks
Edward Hicks was an American folk painter, a distinguished minister of the Society of Friends, and he also became a Quaker icon because of his paintings.-Early life:...
, Theodore Rousseau
Théodore Rousseau
Pierre Étienne Théodore Rousseau , French painter of the Barbizon school, was born in Paris, of a bourgeois family.-Youth:At first he received a business training, but soon displayed aptitude for painting...
, Joan Miró
Joan Miró
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...
(The Ploughed Field or The Hunter), and Yves Tanguy
Yves Tanguy
Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy , known as Yves Tanguy, was a French surrealist painter.-Biography:Tanguy was born in Paris, France, the son of a retired navy captain. His parents were both of Breton origin...
. Crary notes how Rockman combines imaginary and visionary portrayal in an allegorical manner with scientific basis, study of the natural world, and experimental hypothesis.
Other influences
Rockman also drew inspiration from Chesley Bonestell's 1950 Collier'sCollier's Weekly
Collier's Weekly was an American magazine founded by Peter Fenelon Collier and published from 1888 to 1957. With the passage of decades, the title was shortened to Collier's....
magazine illustration Atom Bombing of New York City, which depicts Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
amidst destruction and a glowing orange aura of an atomic bomb.
People that have influenced Rockman include Stephen Jay Gould, whom Rockman met and later wrote two essays about Rockman's work for the monograph published by Monacelli Press. Charles R. Knight
Charles R. Knight
Charles Robert Knight was an American artist best known for his influential paintings of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals...
has a special place in Rockman's development, as he almost single-handedly created the genre of reconstructions of extinct ecosystems.
Some of Rockman's more recent works, including paintings featured in the 2008 Rose Art Museum exhibition, featured a more semi-abstract style than some of Rockman's earlier work that give traditional representation, creating some tension between the styles. In reviewing Rockman's 2008 Rose Art Museum
Rose Art Museum
The Rose Art Museum, founded in 1961, is a part of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA. Named after benefactors Edward and Bertha Rose, it offers temporary exhibitions, and it displays and houses works of art from the Brandeis University art collections...
exhibition, "The Weight of Air", The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe is an American daily newspaper based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Globe has been owned by The New York Times Company since 1993...
art critic Sebastian Smee describes Rockman's work as exhibiting a clash of abstract and his earlier styles, producing "a kind of distraction – a desire in the mind's eye to marry them that is continually frustrated," he though praised Rockman for taking on such subject matter. While Smee found some of Rockman's work overly jarring with clashing styles, Smee praised other pieces, including Wind Regime (2007), describing it as a "stunning painting".
Publications
- Rush, Michael, ed (2008). The Weight of Air. The Rose Art Museum. ISBN 0976159368.
- Distel, Matt, ed (2007). Romantic Attachments. Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. ISBN 0917562798.
- Big Weather, American Icons. Leo Koenig Inc.. 2006.
- Fresh Kills. Gary Tatintsian Gallery Inc.. 2005. (in English & Russian)
- Alexis Rockman. The Monacelli Press. 2004. ISBN 1580931189.
- Manifest Destiny. Gorney Bravin + Lee / Brooklyn Museum. 2004. ISBN 0872731510.
- Wonderful World. Camden Arts Centre. 2004. ISBN 1900470322.
- Mittelbach, Margaret (2005). Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger. Text Publishing. ISBN 1920885843. Rockman's 2004 journeys in TasmaniaTasmaniaTasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...
are recorded in the book Carnivorous Nights, with his accompanying artwork. - Ward, Peter (2002). Future Evolution. Henry Holt & Co. ISBN 0716734966. Rockman did the illustrations for the book Future EvolutionFuture EvolutionFuture Evolution is a book written by paleontologist Peter Ward and illustrated by Alexis Rockman. He addresses his own opinion of future evolution and compares it with Dougal Dixon's After Man: A Zoology of the Future and H. G. Wells's The Time Machine.According to Ward, humanity may exist for a...
, by Peter Douglas Ward. - Dioramas. Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. 1997.
- Dion, Mark; Alexis Rockman (1997). Concrete Jungle: A Pop Media Investigation of Death and Survival in Urban Ecosystems. Juno Books. ISBN 0965104222.
- Guyana. Twin Palms Publishers. 1996. ISBN 0944092411.
- Blinderman, Barry, ed. Second Nature. University Galleries of Illinois State University. ISBN 0945558236.
- Evolution. Sperone Westwater. 1992.
- Blau, Douglas (1992). Alexis Rockman. Jay Gorney Modern Art, New York and Thomas Solomon's Garage.
- Decter, Joshua (1991). Alexis Rockman. John Post Lee Gallery.
Further reading
- Small World: Dioramas in Contemporary Art / essays by Toby Kamps and Ralph Rugoff. San Diego, Calif. : Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2000. ISBN 0-934418-54-3
External links
- Articles about Alexis Rockman. New York Times
- Alexis Rockman on artnet