Gail Boyajian “merges traditional landscape painting with a new world reality, infused with personal and historical memories. Something is happening in these pictures; there are celebrations in spite of the perilous surroundings. Beautiful birds perch on razor wire. American soldiers stand like angels watching over a dance. There are military helicopters in the sky along with the hawks. I am interested in making a dramatic image out of the layers of various belief systems, from the ancient Greek myths to Old Testament stories to 19th century evolutionary theory to modern newspaper immediacy.”

Elli Crocker has been exploring specifically the human/animal interface as a metaphor for our relationship with the “other” and Nature. Referencing folklore, myth, and the medieval “bestiary”, animals are seen as symbols and anthropomorphic beings. They engage our fantasies and fears, our longings and appetites. These images do not necessarily derive from an observable world but stand at a margin of consciousness between that which is known and that which is felt; between objective analysis and intuitive understanding, between science and art.

Karen Moss creates tree forms and “paintings” out of material that derives from trees - shopping catalogues - so her material has come “full cycle”. Nature as commodity in a literal sense is embodied in her work. “In the Spring of 2001, I decided to make use of the heavy volume of consumer catalogues that were arriving in mailboxes throughout my neighborhood. In a few months, I collected over six hundred catalogues and had them industrially shredded so I could use the paper strips to create collages and sculpture. I have been making eleven foot tall trees out of wire and shredded catalogues as well as collages mounted on canvas and paper”.

“While I am attracted to the endless variety of contour in animals and plants, the silhouettes I make are ways of exploring how physical appearance and symbolic identity merge. While ‘nature’ is a phenomenon outside of the body, it also exists as a rich library of archetypes and impressions within our minds. The overlapping landscape of the real and the imagined fascinates me. I am interested in exploring Nature as an animate, anthropomorphic presence. My goal is to make work that reflects both a visceral fascination with the outside world and a layered appreciation for its interior reflections.”

“I am interested in our relationship to nature, evolution, individuality and separateness. If all matter has been here since the Big Bang forming and deconstructing and reforming into something new again and again, what then is the nature of our differentness as a species and as an individual? What is our connectedness to all things, both organic and inorganic? What does it mean that we share 75% of our genes with a mouse or a worm, or that the secrets of the genes are found in proteins, of which there are thousands in every gene? My work is built up slowly, beginning with abstract layers of color into which I might scratch or paint the suggestion of forms – cells, eggs, skeins of protein. Some have layers of old wallpaper in them, something ‘man-made’, which is suggestive of cultural, pastoral attitudes toward Nature. Over this I paint images of birds or animals, sometimes humans, to suggest a relationship between us and the larger world of nature in a visual, thoughtful, and sometimes humorous way.”