Arts: What Happens to the Animals After Doomsday?

Now playing: Slate V, a video-only site from the world's leading online magazine. Visit Slate V at www.slatev.com.
Behold What Happens to the Animals After Doomsday? By Alyssa Coppelman Posted Thursday, Jan 31, 2013, at 04:00 PM ET While biblical ideas of the end of the world have dominated Western art for millennia, photographer Simen Johan envisions a different sort of end times. In his project, "Until the Kingdom Comes," Johan creates and photographs animals living in harsh, confused and climate-disrupted landscapes. His work, on display through Feb. 17 at David Winton Bell Gallery, in Providence, R.I., is a magnificent display of these shifting environments. Johan's skill lies in creating images of a perhaps-not-so-mythical future world where creatures are depicted in the wrong environment, and beasts that shouldn't coexist do just that. These tremendous images certainly have a footing in the tradition of naturalists such as John James Audubon. Johan's work, which has contemporary counterparts in artists like Walton Ford, presents an alternative to the traditional view of the natural world in which the influence of humanity's excesses is sensed, if not immediately seen. Johan, who began his continuing project in 2006, explained his process via email. He crafts his fantastical images mostly by photographing "animals that live in zoos, on farms, or on nature preserves," but he occasionally relies on creatures that have been taxidermied in museum dioramas or found as road kill. "I then situate them in settings that I have photographed elsewhere." He prefers photographing live animals and says, "When you create images as large as I do, up to 10 feet, you're limited to what you can do digitally. Taxidermy looks dead and if you tweak too much ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate The Idiocy of Sequestration America's Nuclear Dumpsters House of Cards	Advertisement
Manage your newsletters subscription: Unsubscribe | Forward to a Friend | Advertising Information
Ideas on how to make something better? Send an e-mail to slatenewsletter@nl.slate.com. Copyright 2011 The Slate Group | Privacy Policy The Slate Group | c/o E-mail Customer Care | 1350 Connecticut Ave NW Suite 410 | Washington, D.C. 20036