Gallery: Gallery: 10 Visions of the Postnatural World
0110ar-south-detail
*South*, 2008 (detail): ----------------------- Inspired by a trip to the Antarctic Peninsula, the painting "became a group portrait of soon to be extinct things," said Rockman. "That's anthropomorphic, because ice isn't alive. But it's a thing that's under duress."
0202ar-biosphereorchids
*Biosphere: Orchids*, 1993: --------------------------- "I always wanted to do a body of work that related to Douglas Trumbull's *Silent Running*," said Rockman. "The idea of the last life on Earth, in these geodesic domes in space. This is one of the botanical versions of that."
0303ar-biospherehydrographerscanyon
*Biosphere: Hydrographer's Canyon*, 1994: ------------------------------------------ Reminiscent of Ernst Haeckel's anatomical surveys but given context, this work reflects Rockman's question, "How do you take the base of the food chain, and put it in the most hostile environment possible?" he said. "I see that more and more as the way that things are going to be able to survive."
0404ar-hostandvector
*Host and Vector*, 1996: ------------------------ Inspired by a trip to the jungles of Guyana, this work features Rockman playing it straight, painting only what was in front of him. "The wonder, the amazing diversity of what's created when things are competing at a high level," he sad. "Between the fluke, the snail and the Montezuma Oropendola is an isosceles triangle. They're equally dependent on the other."
0505ar-airport
*Airport*, 1997: ---------------- "I was reading about how rabbits had created these underground networks of burrows that were compromising the structural integrity of runways," said Rockman. "In the collision between nature and technology, most of the times, the animals lose. But there's a strange battle that's being waged."
0606ar-hammock
*The Hammock*, 2000: -------------------- "It's more of a joke about the subjectivity of ecotourism and visions of control that run amok, or fail," Rockman said.
0707ar-cataclysm
*Cataclysm*, 2003: ------------------ "We all have tremendous amounts of empathy for third-world disasters, man-made or natural," said Rockman. "I've always been fascinated by what happens to things that don't have a voice, that aren't considered, that are unlovable."
0808-ar-manifestdestiny
*Manifest Destiny*, 2003-2004 (detail): --------------------------------------- Commissioned by the Brooklyn Museum, the mural-sized work imagines Brooklyn's waterfront drowned by the climate consequences of unrestrained industrial expansion. "There's a beauty to it. I'm not pessimistic about anything, other than human quality of life," said Rockman. "If you're into biodiversity, you're out of luck. But there's going to be lots of life."
09p104-105
*Sea World*, 2001-2004: ----------------------- Featuring prehistoric Dunkleosteus and Ambulocetus leaping for treats, equal parts Jurassic Park and spring break, "it's the feeling that anything will go, if it's thought that it will create enough commerce," Rockman said.
10p032
Able to lament the tragedy of nature's disruption and glory in the vitality of its survivors, Alexis Rockman is the perfect artist for the anthropocene. The son of an archaeologist, the New York-based painter's childhood spanned both rural Peru and the American Museum of Natural History, prefiguring the fascinations that would shape his career: time, biology, ecology and humanity. Traces of museum dioramas can be seen in works like his 1992 mural-sized *Evolution* (detail, above). So can the Hudson River school landscape tradition, Renaissance realism and a prehistory-infused apocalyptic futurism in which humans shape but can't short-circuit the continuum of life. The Smithsonian American Art Museum is now hosting the first major Rockman retrospective, entitled -- with a nod to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring -- ["Alexis Rockman: A Fable Tomorrow"](http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2010/rockman/). He talked to Wired.com about his work.
