Gallery: Postnatural: Intense Animal Art for the 21st Century
01babble
At a cultural moment of animal art ubiquity, with naturalists' drawings practically a uniform hipster accessory, George Boorujy's paintings hit like a jolt of electricity. The animals he draws -- often larger-than-life, in hyperrealistic detail -- don't rest on the page in idealized repose. They stare back at viewers as if in confrontation, demanding to be recognized as more than anonymous species ideals. Sometimes they seem majestic. At other times they look damaged. Often they're both. Though Boorujy's thematic tradition dates to the natural compendia of past centuries, his vision is shaped by the state of nature in the 21st century: intertwined with human landscapes, insulted but resilient, gloriously alive and often overlooked. "You don't need to go to Borneo or Papua New Guinea to see an amazing bird," said Boorujy. "Go here. This is an environment. This is an ecosystem. This is something. Let's look at what's here, at the things we've seen already a thousand times, but really *look* at them." Boorujy's [new exhibition, *Blood Memory*](http://www.ppowgallery.com/exhibition.php?id=103 ), opened March 15 at the PPOW gallery in New York City. It runs through April 14. For readers who can't visit the exhibition in person, Wired takes a digital tour on the following pages. __Above:__ ### *Babble* *2011, ink on paper, 38 x 50 inches* "It's a very centralized composition. I wanted that in all these pieces. I want you to be able to get lost in the detail, and zone out into this meditative space," said Boorujy. "That's one reason I do them so detailed. If someone looks at a huge photograph of something, they think, 'That's cool,' and move on to something else. We're so visually sophisticated at this point that we recognize 'photograph' immediately. We process it so much quicker, because we're bombarded by photographs. If you see something that's photographic, but made by hand, you slow down. I want people to slow down."
02thunder-perfect-mind
### *Thunder, Perfect Mind* *2011, ink on paper, 38 x 50 inches* "I wanted her to be strong but beautiful, but not just a picture of a doe. I wanted viewers to pause for a second," said Boorujy of how he conceived this work. "Is she going to have a radio collar on, or a tattoo on on her ear? Is this animal husbandry, or is she a pet, or something? That seemed too straightforward, too specific. But some white-tailed deer are melanistic. We're so used to seeing a deer look like an idealized version that when you see one like this, it's not your expectation. You're not used to seeing color variation, but it does exist."
03anting
### *Anting* *2011, ink on paper, 55 1/2 x 108 inches* "People have such strong feelings about blue jays. People love to hate them. They shouldn't be so maligned," Boorujy said. "They're brash and they have power. If you saw one for the first time, you'd be like, 'What the hell!' They're so beautiful." The title refers to a behavior in which birds spread their wings on the ground, allowing ants to climb into their feathers and eat parasites.
04fugue
### *Fugue* *2010, ink on paper, 38 x 50 inches* "If you make eye contact with an animal, it's intense. If it's not behind glass or something, they have a concept of what you are. You get a jolt," Boorujy said. "Almost everything I draw is usually making eye contact. I'm interested in the gaze, in not observing something as if it was part of a diorama. I want the viewer to be part of it."
05florida-ii-hurricane-andrew
### *Florida II (Hurricane Andrew)* *2010, ink on paper, 51 1/2 x 107 inches* Boorujy attended college in Florida, arriving shortly before Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992. "The next day it was devastation. Every tree down, every stoplight down. I walked out onto campus and found a dead owl," he said. "There were all these human dramas, and I thought there must be so many weird animal dramas being enacted that we didn't know about." The image of a doe nursing a full-grown buck is a reference to "the end of *The Grapes of Wrath*, when Rosa Sharon is in the barn with the old man who's dying, and nurses him," Boorujy said.
06initiate
### *Initiate* *2011, ink on paper, 48 x 53 inches* As with the pronghorn antelope in *Fugue*, yellow pollen speckles the coat of this bighorn ram. "Whether it is by human hands as part of a ritual or by chance is not clear," reads Boorujy's [artist statement from PPOW](http://www.ppowgallery.com/press_release.php?id=103 ).
07frigate
### *Frigate Bird* *2011, ink on paper, 38 x 50 inches* "Male frigate birds have this spectacular adaptation: Their skin can be inflated enormously to attract mates," said Boorujy. "Of course, they wouldn't ever be on their back, lying down and making bedroom eyes. But I liked the idea of reorienting it. He's not dead, but is he oppressed by his overdeveloped sexuality? Is it come-hither? It's weird for him to be on his back. I just like how disorienting that is."
08when-was-it-that-i-knew-you
### *When Was It That I Knew You* *2012, ink on paper, 72 x 132 inches* At 6 feet high and more than 10 feet long, this colossal image is the largest in the exhibition. It magnifies the precision of Boorujy's craftsmanship: In keeping with naturalist art tradition, he works with ink, which makes it difficult to correct or cover mistakes. Each brushstroke must be the right one.
09father
### *Father* *2011, ink on paper, 38 x 50 inches* A cormorant feeding his child -- with partially digested fish, retrieved from deep in his gullet -- appears almost to be consuming it.
10and-then-we-heard-the-voice
### *And Then We Heard the Voice* *2012, ink on paper, 28 x 40 inches* Almost all the paintings in *Blood Exhibition* involve animals. *Voice* is a rare landscape exception, a mountain with two yellow-painted stripes hinting at a human influence of epic but unknown purpose.
11moraine
### *Moraine* *2009, ink on paper, 38 x 50 inches* *Moraine* hails from Boorujy's previous PPOW exhibition, *Migratory Drift*. "I don't depict people all that often," he said. "It's so loaded. 'What's his deal? Where's she from?' You start reading into it so much when you see a person." When people do appear in his paintings, they're usually naked and devoid of historical or cultural signifiers. Boorujy wants the scenes "to look as though they could be taking place a thousand years in the future or ten thousand years in the past," he said in an [interview with *Bibliokept*](http://biblioklept.org/2012/03/15/george-boorujy-talks-to-biblioklept-about-painting-animals-and-people-his-new-show-blood-memory-and-throwing-bottled-drawings-into-new-york-waterways/ ).
12glacier-2
### *Glacier* *2008, ink on paper, 38 x 50 inches* Also from *Migratory Drift*, this landscape proves on close examination to be a hybrid of natural and human-directed. The glacier is artificial, adorned with doorways and scaffolding, and occupies the space where a real glacier would once have been. "How do we see the environment? How do we interact with it? How do we view our landscape and our wildlife? How do we fit in?" asks Boorujy.
