$5,000
Painted steel with bronze figures
9′ x 42″ x 32″
From the artist:
What Then Must We Do?
And the people asked, “What then must we do, lord?
And Christ answered, “Do violence to none. If you have two shirts give one to he who has none.
– Paraphrasing Luke
What use is a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?
– Thoreau
My work is a reaction to the destruction of our planet’s biosphere. Pollution, overfishing, habitat loss, deforestation, climate change, ocean acidification, etc. – we are killing plants and animals at rates unseen since the demise of the dinosaurs. In this century alone half of all species now alive will go extinct. This 6th Extinction, as it is now called, is real. It is happening and will continue for long years to come, unless we do something about it. As an artist, my task has been to alert people of the severity of the problem. I am driven by a sense of moral outrage, the same outrage that Tolstoy once felt upon witnessing the abject poverty of the Russian peasants. Tolstoy’s response was beautifully simple. He posed a question (a call to arms really), the same question we should be asking ourselves: What then must we do?
High Rise is metaphor for the world as I see it – an increasingly urbanized planet where most people live in tall buildings surrounded by other people, going about their daily activities in a stream of constant motion. Nature, in this brave new world of ours, is nowhere to be seen, relegated to a single tree growing like a weed with stubborn and stoic defiance in the unnoticed space between a machine and the side of a building. Nature, it seems, is tough and will not go down without a fight. But she needs our help. You can either join the fray, help slow down the mass extinctions or stand aside and watch the world fade into night. Choose quickly. There is no time.
Artist website: http://www.technozoicdreams.com