New Limited Edition Print Release: “Body Language”
Hand Signed Limited Edition of 50 Giclee PrintThe original of this piece is 20” x 24” Oil on Canvas, and is currently on display at Thinkspace Gallery. It was created in part for their exhibit, “Wild at Heart: Keep Wildlife in the Wild” to benefit Born Free Usa.
“Body Language” features 2 Rhesus Macaque monkeys, a mother and child, holding a Rubik’s Cube. For years the rhesus macaque has been the prototype for the lab monkey and space monkey, subject to countless medical and psychological experiments including sleep deprivation and being sent to their demise in space. Ironically, the macaque shares about 93% of their DNA sequence with humans, in addition to a having common ancestor roughly 25 million years ago. Macaques are also incredibly intelligent socially - a young female rhesus monkey stays with her mother and sisters for life, forming “one of the tightest and most complicated social systems known in the animal kingdom” according to renowned primatologist Frans de Waal. In the name of science and the human impulse to control and exhaust everything, the macaques are the ones who suffer. I chose the Rubik’s Cube for many reasons. It’s both a symbol of their intelligence and their disinterest in what we perceive as intelligent. It is also tied to the cosmic landscape beyond, as the game itself has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible configurations, and counting each of those at the rate of 1 per second it would take you longer than the current age of the Universe.
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