Born in 1969 in Washington Josh Keyes graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later received his MFA at Yale. His most well known works depict lost and stranded N. American wildlife, placed upon abstracted cross-sections of the environment, cluttered by the paraphernalia and detritus of today's society. Implicitly reflecting in existential and symbolic terms the actual plight of most of the world's ecosystem during the ongoing disaster that is Man's effect on the planet.

His highly naturalistic style is reminiscent of scientific and educational textbooks, encyclopaedias and natural history dioramas. However more striking still is the juxtaposition of powerful scenes of ecological destruction and raw beauty of nature, intrinsically opening up a moral debate regarding the progress of civilisation at the cost of the very support system that has enabled it to survive and expand throughout the aeons of time.

Most of the damage and destruction inflicted on the world has been conducted by a very thin slice of Man's progeny, indeed less than a few generations have through a variety of chemical, industrial, and biological processes wiped a massive percentage of biodiversity from history, forever. Capitalism is based upon the idea of growth, the premise that sustainability equals commercial stagnation. For example at one time in Britain, a particular car company Austin, developed the Morris Minor, it was simply constructed, almost every section could be replaced, commonly by the owner, or a local mechanic. The raw materials for production included metal and wood, but no plastic. Many of Morris Minors are still being driven to this day, especially in the Sub Continent and Eastern Europe. So what's the problem? The problem is that Austin soon found that unlike today, whereby millions of cars are replaced almost every year or two, a Morris Minor can potentially last a hundred years with little more than light maintenance. Soon the company went bust, it was making massive losses as past customers would need little more than spare parts, no one needed a new car.

The lessons learned from sustainable manufacturing has resulted in an influx of vast and greedy corporations obsessed with every heightening the need for mass consumption. To create this market almost all products in the world are made to an inferior standard, thereby ensuring repeat custom. This in turn has created a new problem, waste, vast landfill sites, deep sea dumps, toxic ground water pollution, plastic mountains, and untapped methane pockets are encroaching on more and more of the last pristine areas of wildlife in the world. Chemicals, bi-products of years of industrial processing, many of which are now banned, have entered the evolutionary chain, light enough to rise with the heat of the sun and fall with the rain, many coal-powered energy plants still pollute the skies with substances such as Barium. This chemical cocktail is causing infertility and mutation in many insects, fish, mammals, even humans around the world.

Nestle amongst other companies bottle clean spring water in Third World countries, they neither clean nor treat it for any potential disease, they simply package it and sell it back to the poor. The same with foreign water companies, who invest in pipelines and treatment centres, racking up the price of water so only the rich can afford it. The rest must drink from filthy rivers and ponds, many of which are heavily polluted due to the lack of governmental intervention. This ironically is exactly the reason rich Western companies will even consider investing in such areas, they can literally get away with murder.

Honey bees are dying out, it may seem a trivial thing in the grand scheme of things, but without honey bees there will be no further pollination, plant life will die out, this will both kill off much of the world's wildlife but also contribute to pollution. Much of our ecology, what remains of it, is in fact a carbon sink, without it we breathe less oxygen, we will in turn all die.

The false objectivization of our natural world is displayed prominently in much of Keye's work, he depicts our abstraction, our disconnection with the ecology, this distance will one day destroy us as it has so many other animals on this planet. Animals portray a root connection with nature, their instincts alert and pure as were ours in ancient pre-history. We can use language, interpretative discourse to ally our primal fears, they cannot. The rabbit which features in many of Keye's paintings acts almost as a warning signal, a siren, an alarm call. Hyenas are scavengers, feeding as do buzzards and crows, on the remains of another's kill, carrion. The consumption and mutation of N. American wildlife is also heavily featured, sections of flesh removed from deer, two-headed rabbits, and so on.

Other paintings such as "The Entangle" and "Street" series, represent, at least for me personally, something of a more hopeful message, or at least for wildlife at large. Nature encroaching upon our concrete environment, roots tearing apart roads, statues wrapped in vines and weeds. Essentially, should man cease to exist, nature will recover, life of some description will continue to survive. The worst element to the human race, akin to a virus or infestation in nature, is our number. The more of us there are, the more pollution, the less space and natural resources, the more damage to the ecosystem.

Check out more of Josh Keyes' work at www.joshkeyes.net. There's also a great interview with Keyes here and find out about his upcoming shows here.

This post is tagged ecology, environment, environmentalism, Josh Keyes, painting