Tim Svenonius
Much of my work engages with mythic ideas that underlie our national and cultural identities. I am drawn to the representations of wilderness dominant in heritage iconography--the fauna and untrammeled landscapes, for instance, that adorn our coins and state flags.
A series of new works called the Gray Glass Drawings are named for a device popular with 18th century landscape artists: a dark-tinted mirror known as the “Gray glass,” or Claude glass, that would reflect an outdoor scene in fashionably atmospheric tones. It's demonstrative of an impulse to mediate the natural world--an enhancing “filter," two and a half centuries before Instagram.
Additionally, a new book, Animalia Paradoxa, is inspired by the work of the 18th-century naturalist Carl Linnaeus. The book is letterpress-printed in an edition of 100. Various recent experimental letterpress prints will also be available.
For more information about the artist, please visit his website.