James Prosek, the Addison Gallery of American Art’s new Artist in Residence, has long been fascinated with nature. Between fishing trips in his picturesque Connecticut neighborhood, he remembers meticulously recreating John James Audubon paintings as a child.
Prosek, whose work is currently featured in the Addison in the exhibit “The Spaces in Between,” gave a lecture on his art and his interest in biology on Wednesday night.
Particularly interested in trouts when he was young, Prosek began his artistic career writing letters to departments of wildlife across the country and painting pictures of trouts inspired by Audubon’s work on birds. He learned that the number of species of trout is contested due to the ambiguity of defining the species, inspiring him to wonder about the restrictions of conventional organizational systems.
For Prosek, his artistic career complements his pursuits relating to nature.
“When I drew a fish, I was forced to observe it much closer. It made me a better observer and a more astute watcher of the environment,” he said. Prosek has traveled across the world, including the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers as well as to Suriname in order to do research for books and paintings.
Much of Prosek’s work is critical of the traditional systems of organization and nomenclature in science. According to the Addison press release, Prosek “examin[es] the ways in which we name and order nature, the systems we use to try to harness nature and the limitations of language in describing biological diversity.”
“Nature’s this fluid, constantly changing, constantly evolving thing. It really does it a disservice to try to chop it up into communicable units,” Prosek said.
One of his pieces in the Addison is a massive mural covering multiple walls depicting the silhouettes of birds. Prosek said that the mural was designed to resembles visual guides in the back of nature books, which are typically labelled with numbers that correspond to the names of the birds. While Prosek’s birds have numbers, they don’t have names.
Prosek’s work also includes surrealist hybrid creatures, including a watercolor piece displaying a duck with a drill for a beak, titled “Drill Duck with Pitcher Plant Flowers,” and a taxidermied sculpture of a beaver with a chain around his tail titled, “Industrial Evolution.”
“His drawings were so realistic that I thought half of his imaginary animals were real!” said Rachel Gerrard ’15.
Though nature was Prosek’s first love, his artistic career has become his main focus.
“I feel that my explorations mainly take place in the studio now,” he said. “I have enough stuff in my head. Painting is enough to challenge me.”
“It’s a really interesting set of ideas—naming is more reflective of human qualities than of the inherent qualities of nature. We try to understand things in quantitative parts, and it’s hard to look at them as a whole. And I appreciate his gentle and reverent tone. This kind of curiosity creates more open space to look around [and] ask questions,” said Anna Milkowski, Instructor in Biology.
The Artist in Residence program is made possible by the generosity of Edward E. Elson ’52. Prosek’s exhibition “The Spaces in Between” will be on view until January 5, 2014.
