Thomas Eggerer

The Ruins

2013

Michael Gregory was born in 1955 in Los Angeles, CA and received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980. Previously living and working in Bolinas, California, Gregory h...

Michael Gregory lives and works in Bolinas, California, and for several years, Gregory has been fascinated with the study of old barns and silos. While...

In his book Now or Never naturalist Tim Flannery describes a vision of a world with a dead purple ocean and a poisonous green sky. This is a world where warming has melted the ice caps and slowed down the circulation of the oceans so that they have become like a gigantic stagnant pond. This still oxygen depleted water will allow the proliferation of anoxygenic bacteria that will change the chemistry of the ocean making it poisonous to oxygen dependant life. These bacteria will also release hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere causing a mass extinction of animal and plant life on land. This stark yet colourful world will be sublimely beautiful, but there will be no one around to see it. This series of paintings depicts an imagining of our world after the catastrophic consequences of climate change through a reinterpretation of well-known images with a romantic sensibility towards nature. Romanticism was in part a reaction to the industrial revolution marked by a nostalgia for an untouched natural world and a reverence for its overwhelming power. Ironically the spread and continuation of that industrialism is predicted to set in motion a new version of nature that will completely overpower the human world as we know it. With these thoughts in mind, I’ve sourced some paintings associated with the romantic movement and removed the human figures from them – the only evidence of people are the decaying ruins left behind in this uncanny green and purple landscape. I’ve also referenced some photographs from the Apollo moon missions that are thought to have influenced the beginning of modern environmental awareness. The starting point for this series of paintings was Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead...

Jenny Day is a painter who divides her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico and Tucson, Arizona. She paints a fragmented space, examining human demand and the effects of environmental d...

The works that I exhibit at Contemporaneo Asheville arise from the autobiographical that answers vital questions, recurrent thoughts, obsessions, the history of art and literature. M...