Alexis Rockman

Alexis Rockman (born 1962) is an American contemporary artist known for his paintings that provide depictions of future landscapes as they might exist with impacts of climate change and evolution influenced by genetic engineering.

The Biosphere series, referencing Douglass Trumbull's seminal 1971 film Silent Running', envisions a situation where the Earth has become too toxic for human life, and the last vestiges of nature are placed in geodesic domes on space ships roaming the outer reaches of our solar system.

Biosphere also references the quasi-scientific experiment Biosphere 2 in Arizona.

From 1980 to 1982, Rockman studied animation at the Rhode Island School of Design, and continued studies at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, receiving a BFA in fine arts in 1985.

Aside from his art career, Rockman has taken on requests from conservation groups, including the Riverkeeper project and the Rainforest Alliance.

He lives with his wife, Dorothy Spears in Warren, CT and NYC.

Rockman also had exhibitions at galleries in Los Angeles, Boston, and Philadelphia in the late 1980s.

Early work was inspired by natural history iconography.

In Phylum, Rockman draws upon the work of Ernst Haeckel, an artist and proponent of Darwinism.

He has exhibited his work in the United States since 1985, including a 2004 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, and internationally since 1989.

He lives with his wife, Dorothy Spears in Warren, CT and NYC.

Rockman was born and raised in New York City.

Rockman's stepfather, Russell Rockman, an Australian jazz musician, brought the family to Australia frequently.

As a child, Rockman frequented the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where his mother, Diana Wall, worked briefly for anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Growing up, Rockman had an interest in natural history and science, and developed fascination for film, animation, and the arts.

Rockman began exhibiting his work at the Jay Gorney Modern Art gallery in New York City in 1986 and was represented by the gallery from 1986 to 2005.

Curated by Barry Blinderman, this is the first museum survey of Rockman's paintings featuring thirty works ( 18 large scale paintings and 12 smaller works) from 1986 to 1994, with catalog essays by Barry Blinderman, Douglas Blau, Stephen Jay Gould, Prudence Roberts, and Peter Ward.

A series of works by Rockman in the early 1990s, including Barnyard Scene (1990), Jungle Fever (1991), and The Trough (1992), use dark humor in depicting different species mating with one another.

In Barnyard Scene, Rockman depicts a raccoon mating with a rooster, and Jungle Fever shows a praying mantis mating with a chipmunk.

In 1992, Rockman painted his first large scale painting, Evolution, which was exhibited at Sperone Westwater Gallery in 1992, the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Venice Biennale in 1993.

In 1993, Rockman created Still Life, a still life depiction of a pile of fish and marine specimens, evoking reference to 1935 horror James Whale film Bride of Frankenstein and films by Luis Buñuel.

In Still Life, Rockman alludes to the Wunderkammer, placing "aberrant contents" amidst a Baroque still life scene, which traditionally is abundant with wealth and goods from Dutch and Spanish colonies.

Rockman traveled to Guyana in 1994 with fellow artist Mark Dion, resulting in numerous paintings of the flora and fauna that he observed.

For the 1994 trip, he strictly painted works that depicted what he saw, with particular interest in various types of insects.

Illinois State University, University Galleries, Normal Illinois, August 17- September 29, 1995.

The exhibition traveled to the Portland Art Museum (June 5 - July 23, 1995), Cincinnati Art Museum(Oct. 22 - Dec. 31, 1995), the Tweed Museum of Art (Feb. 6 - March 17, 1996) and The Cranbrook Art Museum (September 20 - October 27, 1996).

Many of Alexis Rockman's works have been inspired by his travels around the world, including to Costa Rica, Brazil, Madagascar, Guyana, Tasmania, the Galapagos and Antarctica.

Neblina (1995), one of the last works resulting from the Guyana trip, was painted after the collapse of a tailings dam at the Omni gold mine in Guyana, resulting in cyanide leaking into the waterway.

Neblina shows wildlife huddled together high in tree branches.

Rockman returned to Guyana in 1998, and his works from that trip focused on aspects of ecotourism.

Rockman's painting The Farm was commissioned by Creative Time and exhibited at the Exit Art Gallery in New York City in 2000, as part of the "Paradise Now: Picturing Genetic Revolution" exhibition.

The work depicts domestic and agricultural animals and plants, and how they may appear in the future, as a result of genetic engineering.

The work examines how our culture perceives and interacts with plants and animals and the role culture plays in impacting the direction of natural history.

In his painting, The Farm, rows of soybean plants extend toward the horizon.

"The way I constructed it is that, as in a lot of Western cultures, we read things from left to right.".

"On the left side of the image are the ancestral species of the chicken, the pig, the cow, and the mouse"; on the right, their contemporary versions.

Farther to the right are "permutations of what things might look like in the future."

The choice of a soybean field as his subject is fitting since soybeans are the most common, genetically modified crop.

Rockman traveled to Antarctica in 2008 with Dorothy Spears, and works resulting from this voyage were featured in the "Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape" exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Dioramas involved a pointed move away from painting: each of the nine works in the exhibition combines paint with collage elements, including photographs, readymade and found objects ( dead animals, etc.), each encases in a block of transparent Envirotex resin between three and a quarter and five inches thick.