Issue 26 - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

TOWARDS A NEW
ANIMISM
Drawing from a deep phylogeny of cultural cues, Chris Musina references historical painters, contemporary animal
cultures, kitsch and museum dioramas in an exploration of the represented relationships to the animal world. Musina
addresses the animal not as symbolic object, but as subject, yet a subject aware of its own powerful symbolic nature;
painting is interesting to the artist precisely because of this reason and its effects. These paintings are populated with
“knowing animal protagonists” who stare back at the viewer with an uneasy gaze; aware of that uncomfortable
places they occupy in our cultural histories--asking for compassion, mercy, or simply to be put out of their misery.
Text by Chris Musina
F
ascinated by the inherent beauty of
animals, I explore their populating of
human culture, through a deep
phylogeny of cultural cues. My work
investigates how animals are looked at,
represented, and understood by different
cultures and different parts of culture. Be it
Eastern medicine, American sports, Greek
mythology, or evolutionary biology, animals
figure heavily across almost all realms of
humanity, relegated often to commodity,
logo, metaphor or mascot. I want to bring the
animal forward addressing many means of
animal understanding, though the medium of
painting. Painting is as old as human history
itself, and can be a rich and wondrous
examination of our history over vast millennia.
Digging back tens of thousands of years
before recorded history, our ideas of the world
around us were recorded, and that mainly
concerned the local fauna, as painted on the
wall of cave walls. Animals have populated
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our visual culture since then. In dissecting
these cultural animals and animal histories,
painting automatically connects both the
viewer, myself and the animals into this long
becoming. Painting’s time on this planet and
place within our culture is a fertile ground
within which I am able to traverse and
connect historical and contemporary
depictions, ideas, and events. I comb the
past, and probe the present, through other
artists’ paintings and other sources for specific
animals representations as have existed and
exist; animals that have shaped and continue
shaping our view of not only ourselves but also
that of our interactions with them.
I construct my paintings as a dioramic
space. There is a sense of depth, but one that
is rather shallow, loaded with enough details
and enough information to suggest a narrative
without ever completing one: they are
paintings after all. The animals in my work are
in direct confrontation with humans/humanity.