Silas Inoue will show a new series of large scale drawings, pencil on paper from his Wolf Pack series. In the series, wolves have been compressed so they just barely fit into the frames. The drawings evolve around the wolf as signifier of wild nature, and humanity’s attempt to systemize the world and adjust nature to the confines of culture. The wolf was the very first animal to be domesticated, allegedly some 36.000 years ago, while humans where still hunter-gatherers. The large variety of dog breeds that exists today stems from wolfs, and is the result of many different selective breeding’s. The same goes for much of the “natural” that surrounds us in our daily life, vegetables, fruits, life stock animals, pets, flowers, etc. With methods such as selective breeding and mutation breeding, many of these have become very different from their ancient ancestors. Nature has evolved in a direction adapted to human physiology, cultural preferences, and not least the logic of the market. The wolf pack series portray this aspect of our relation with nature, as well as a human tendency to divide the world in dualisms – wild and domestic, nature and culture, good and evil, frame and content. Inoue’s wolves are an ongoing body of works, evolving and growing like a real wolf pack.
John Knuth is debuting Distorted Landscapes at ALAC. These new works reinforce Knuth’s commitment to how we make images of our changing landscape. The Distorted Landscapes layer mirrored Mylar in mountain silhouette forms and as he cuts and staples the Mylar the physical making stretches and pulls the mirror, creating ripples that cause the mirror to distort. These ripples echo the natural forms of the landscapes but they also distort the reflection of what is in front of them. These works don’t offer a fixed view of what the landscape or images is. Instead the Distorted Landscapes propose a vision of an ever changing environment that changes as we interact with it.