Natural Selection

2024, Quint Gallery, San Diego, CA

About the Series

2023 - 2024

“We are civilized generation number 500 or so, counting from 10,000 years ago when we settled down. We are Homo sapiens generation number 7,500 counting from 150,000 years ago when our species presumably arose. And we are human generation number 125,000, counting from the earliest Homo species.” For the Time Being by Annie Dillard

Natural Selection is a series of paintings again referencing flowers from the garden surrounding my home/studio. Each painting is arranged in a grid of sixteen square panels with each panel depicting a detail of a different flower and collectively forming a futuristic hybrid of a single flower. The paintings range in scale from 12” square to 86” square. When installed, the variation in sizes alludes to large, showy flowers in contrast to tiny, overlooked blossoms in the garden.

The process of natural selection today is playing a much smaller role in relationship to unconscious or simulated determinants forming the intricacies of a plant or human’s genotype. Individuals in a population are naturally variable, but Darwin’s concept of ‘“survival of the fittest” for better or worse is more questionable with the vast and unknown possibilities of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence.

The paintings are not meant to be ominous, rather a reaffirmation of my continued sense of wonder in the unending variations in nature’s patterns, colors, and shapes. As time passes, I have an even greater sense of urgency in valuing every precious moment, knowing I am just a blip in Earth’s lifetime radar.