‘Portrait of the artist apologizing, with signage, to two adolescent, mercury-crazed polar bears on melting ice’.

'Portrait of the artist apologizing, with signage, to two adolescent, mercury-crazed polar bears on melting ice'. 2009, oil on canvas, 40 x 106 inches. Private Collection.

I completed the above painting in 2009.  Obviously it is an extension of the idea of the need for acknowledgment of our impact on the planet. Conceptually, it is also a hybrid of project apology and another ongoing performance project of mine – I’m busy being busy, but here’s my card. As such it is also a personal treatise on the limitations of art in affecting social change and my ongoing interrogation of my motives for making art, as an exaltation of beauty versus a provocation for contemplation .

This hybrid painting was inspired partly I think by a documentary about the increasing number of attacks by polar bears on humans in the arctic circle, thought by science to be brought on by a combination of high mercury levels (as a result of the accumulation of man-made pollutants in the marine system), global warming, accelerated by human activity and population levels, and which functions to shift bear and prey migration patterns on account shorter winters and shifting and diminishing ice packs. These factors, individually and collectively, bring individuals with no previous human contact into contact with human settlement.  And then sometimes ‘perpetrators’ are individuals who have had experience with humans are just plain desperate or crazy, or a combination of both.

MORE: http://projectapology.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/83/

' I'm busy being busy, here's my card...' Public intervention, Boston Common, Boston, 2007.