Biophilia

Biophillia, 2014

While human populations continue to grow and our way of life takes us deeper into urban living and supercities, Homo sapiens continue to be inherently biophilic. We bring nature into our homes, curate our personal green spaces, and pay fortunes to be immersed within increasingly unfamiliar wildernesses. Many creatures on planet earth possess profound intelligence, advanced language skills, and the ability to work in groups. What sets us apart is our ability to imagine. We can build complex ways to worship, find divinity and deep meaning in daily rituals, and build global societies based on ideas that stem completely from within our creative minds. 
Throughout our history this mental agility has won humanity such success that we have outgrown the earth and its ecosystems from which we come. Ideals of growth, capitalism, and consumerism have served us more comforts than ever before and have simultaneously wreaked havoc on this finite planet. We’ve landed at a dramatic crossroad. So then, how do we push forward into the future? Mankind has done the impossible several times in our history and always thanks to our unique imagination.

Lewis-Smith immerses us into the ecosystems we rose from and reminds us of the connectedness of all living things. Plant chimera and not-quite- recognizable fauna tableaus suggest an imagined future that is inevitably tweaked at the hand of humankind. Drawing inspiration from the Dutch Golden Era impossible bouquet, floral images highlight this current moment in our history. For this short time, these living collections from around the globe can survive together in a single photograph. Many of the depicted specimens will no longer exist within our lifetimes. The elaborate sets built and documented in the artist’s studio urge viewers to let their minds wander, explore their collective biophilia, and perhaps find a renewed divine to carry us forward into the unknown.