Alexis Rockman is an American contemporary artist known for his paintings that provide rich depictions of future landscapes as they might exist with impacts of climate change and evolution influenced by genetic engineering. He is inspired by his childhood visits to the Museum of Natural History, as well as his expeditions to jungles around the world. He has exhibited his work in the United States since 1985, and internationally since 1989. His work has been shown at the at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Museum and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Alexis Rockman lives in New York City, and works out of a studio in the city's TriBeCa neighborhood.

More info: http://www.alexisrockman.net/

Alexis Rockman takes part in the Telepresent Animal Exhibition, February to May 2014.

The Telepresent Animal Hall of Fame

The Farm

Alexis Rockman

The Farm contextualizes the biotech industry's explosive advances in genetic engineering within the history of agriculture, breeding, and artificial selection in general. The image, a wide-angle view of a cultivated soybean field, is constructed to be read from left to right. The image begins with the ancestral versions of internationally familiar animals, the cow, pig, and chicken, and moves across to an informed speculation about how they might look in the future. Also included are geometrically transformed vegetables and familiar images relating to the history of genetics. In The Farm I am interested in how the present and the future look of things are influenced by a broad range of pressures - human consumption, aesthetics, domestication, and medical applications among them. The flora and fauna of the farm are easily recognizable; they are, at the same time, in danger of losing their ancestral identities.