STARRY

Just read this article on Paul Jacobsen, an artist who’s work inspires a ‘return to nature’ approach to life and resources. Its becoming a popular movement amongst contemporary artists, whether it is more rugged and apocalyptic or romantic like Jacobsen’s. When I work on Starry World, these ideas of the future also cross my mind as I think about how we could integrate into nature, now that we have so many more technological advances, instead of building a concrete jungle around us. A good read!

 Paul Jacobsen is living deliberately. From his rustic Redhook studio to the Walden on wheels he constructed in Sullivan County, Jacobsen has mastered the art of seamlessly integrating the natural with the man-made. A self-proclaimed anti-industrial Romantic, Jacobsen approaches
civilization’s future collapse with a certain nostalgia. Submitting that his “paintings encourage a future with no place for them,” Jacobsen’s “misapocalyptic” Golden Age hovers somewhere between sublime wasteland and Edenic pastoral, more Thoreau than Kaczynski. Jacobsen’s Mouthpiece, currently on view at Gasser Grunert, plays between prelapsarian nature and post-collapse civilization. While Jacobsen draws on the language of the Romantic tradition, his work is not an elaborate lamentation for all things past. He stresses the “importance of looking for something altogether new, because even if the post-petroleum future ends up looking a lot like a return to a natural state, it would be very different because of the wealth of experiences we have had.” What at first might appear as a return to the rudiments of a primal condition is in fact neither utopic nor dystopic. Jacobsen’s kingdom come embraces a compromise between the natural and the artificial much in the manner of William Morris, who appears in the installation almost as a patron saint. (Grace-Yvette Gemmell)

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