Lisa MacLean Artist

Every time I read of yet another animal species headed for extinction I want to scream and tear my hair out. Please let us not preside over the greatest extinction event in history. I don’t want to be alone on the earth, with the only animals left our stuffed toys. Biodiversity matters!

While out skating around Stanley Park last weekend, I noticed that a striking structure of driftwood, branches and leaves had been erected on Third Beach. Friday, since the day was warm and dry, I decided to enact a small intervention into it with my stuffed animal biodiversity/species loss project. During the afternoon I hung up in the structure twenty-four stuffed animals, the animals representing species threatened or destined for extinction, as well as ones crafted in human imagination, and the number twenty four, the hours in a day, standing for the time span of human history.

Around the bottom of it I wove seven coloured crepe paper ribbons, each colour of the rainbow representing the days of the week. Together these suggest the time we have left to get it right, stop destroying animal habitats, change our habits and find a transformed relationship with the natural world of which we’re all a part.

While I was working on this piece, several people stopped by to chat; these included Joan, a Vancouverite now living in Switzerland back for a 50^th high school reunion, her friend Lori, and an unnamed Iranian expatriate. Joan mentioned Gauthier Chapelle as a person to check out, with his ideas of “Le Vivante”, the living. After having finished their walk, the two women returned with two colourful balloons for the interior of the piece. The Iranian fellow told me that the structure reminded him of the tents in which he used to sleep as a child (and said that the two snakes I’d included bothered him, since he had to be vigilant against them as a child in the Iranian countryside). But snakes, too, have their place in the balance of nature.

Later, at sunset, Ty and I returned with small LED lights and the juvenile mannequin, a symbol of the human, and installed these in the wooden frame as well. As the sun slipped down on the horizon,  the lights on the ships waiting to be unloaded came on and the moon came out, people rode by on their bikes, others gathered for a beach bonfire, and we all enjoyed the colours of the piece glowing against the darkness.

Read more about biodiversity here.

Read information about Gauthier Chapelle here.

See more pictures here.

Still working on the idea of the anatomy lesson, I decided to reconfigure the tableau to include one of the female mannequins that I acquired at the Eastside Culture Crawl and graffiti text from various places in the downtown eastside of Vancouver,  an area in the process of social evolution and gentrification, as a kind of anonymous “talk back” to the proceedings in the foreground. Since the anatomy theatre was a privileged space,  one from which the socially disadvantaged would have been excluded, I could imagine a group of the dispossessed pearing in through a window at the “lesson” and wondering what was going on.

See the rest here.

For technical assistance on this video, I’d like to thank Ty Nielson.

This installation is inspired by the 1632 painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt van Rijn. I have used anatomical models and parts, mannequins, dolls and stuffed animals to recreate the anatomy theatre, an arena in which students and the general public would have had the opportunity to watch the official City Anatomist perform a dissection on an executed criminal. In my version, rather than having Dr Tulp perform the dissection, it is the anatomical model himself who is the surgeon general.

As the animation progresses the mannequin hands in the centre of the image hold up different body parts, mostly human but a few animal (as you can see in the image below where a sheep skull is being held aloft). The images projected on the wall include historical anatomical etchings from classic scientific texts and selected pictures from my previous work entitled La Specola, a series of digital image included in the Quintessence exhibit, curated by myself and Catherine Stewart, held at the Nanaimo Art Gallery. To see more images from and information about that show, click here.

To see all the still photographs, click here. Here is the original painting:

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp 1632

See more information on my anatomical art here. Read more about Rembrandt’s painting here and here.

“This Would Be Nothing Without You” was selected as one of the winners of the 2010 Digital Art.LA International Exhibition at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art.

The selected winners will be exhibited as the central focus of the “Digital Art.LA” expo in a large group exhibit at the LACDA gallery (selected net.art entries will be exhibited on the artists’ websites). The show will be widely promoted and will include a reception for the artists in Los Angeles on Thursday Sept 9 (which I will attend). The expo screenings, exhibits and events are throughout the day and evening on September 9, 2010 (concurrent with and promoted by the Downtown Art Walk and the Downtown Film Festival Los Angeles). The winners exhibit will remain in the gallery September 9-October 2, 2010.

The 2010 Digital Art.LA International Juried Exhibit is curated by Peter Frank, Critic, Curator; Riverside Art Museum, California. The selected work is from a series entitled “Hanging by a Slender Thread”.

In addition, two other works from this series, “Landscape with Cowboys” and “Satyr v1″, have been selected for the international juried exhibition of electronic art organised by the Hungarian Electrographic Art Association. This exhibition, Matrices 2010, will be shown at the Danube Gallery, KAS Gallery, Hungarian Workshop Gallery, D-Court Gallery, and FISE Gallery in Budapest, Hungary from August until October 2010.

Los Angeles Center For Digital Art
107 West Fifth Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
http://www.lacda.com/
http://digitalart.la/

See more information and work from this series here.

See more information about the exhibition here.

Here is the invitation for Matrices 2010, shows including my work currently being exhibited in galleries around Budapest.

Click here to see the catalogue.

Two of my digital photographs have been selected for the international juried exhibition of electronic art organised by the Hungarian Electrographic Art Association. Matrices 2010 will be shown at the Danube Gallery, KAS Gallery, Hungarian Workshop Gallery, D-Court Gallery, and FISE Gallery in Budapest, Hungary from August until October 2010.

Landscape with Cowboys

Satyr v 1

See more work from this series here.

Just riding around town with my mannequin bits …

For information on the big bird sculptures at Athletes Village, click here.

I have made a video collage documenting some of my site-specific installations in ruined cave houses in the village of Ibrahimpasa, Cappadocia, Turkey, made in March 2009 while an artist in residence at the Babayan Culture House. For more information on this project, click here.

To see the catalogue documenting my projects in Cappadoccia, click here.

In honour of Halloween this year I am continuing to play with my workshop mannequin shrine …

See more here.

Fun and games with mannequins on the Yellow point peninsula:

I finally had an opportunity to arrange my mannequins on the island this past week. Later in the afternoon, with the beautiful sun just starting to wane in the sky and casting a golden glow over the back of Maggie’s yard, I arranged my plastic people in various configurations next to the trees.

Later on, after dark, in preparation for Halloween, I constructed a shrine inside the workshop, using materials found around the property. I was amazed to see that the Christmas lights coming out of the headless neck of one of the mermaid mannequins actually worked – huzzah!

See more here.