Genus #26

My name is Kevin Oehler. The piece I'm showing here is titled “Genius #26”, and it's the 26th in a series of large drawings that I started in about the year 2000. All the works in this series are about the size of an adult human, at 32 inches wide by 72 inches high. These works are all made of charcoal, graphite and black pigment that's first laid down on primed paper as really dark, black silhouetted forms. The detail is lifted and erased out, a bit like the mezzotint technique you’d find in intaglio printmaking. I think of these final forms as roughly figurative, and, if you will, a bestiary of biomorphic hybrids. In my process, I first lay out a base skeleton that often feels somewhat mechanical in nature, and that base supports vine like growth that morphs into muscle tissue, seed pods, thorny branches, sometimes even insect and machine parts. I work these elements spontaneously around the structure so they grow rhizome-like around that support. I hope they evoke an unknown life form that's built of strangely familiar parts. I guess they are kind of the Burgess Shale of artworks, featuring organisms that got lost in an evolutionary process. These pieces are much more science fiction than science. But I hope for viewers looking at the work, they are mysterious and surprising, and speak to the interconnectedness of life.