So I started including “explanatory” signs, in snow or on little scraps of salvaged cardboard, that put questions in their minds about the fate of the majestic and universally beloved creatures, and their darling offspring, that I was depicting.  I imagined them asking their parents about climate issues and the fate of the natural world, of the animals whose fate, bizarrely, rests in the hands of human beings like themselves.  The bears became so popular that I took the opportunity to speak on such topics in various news and entertainment venues, and this, in turn, brought out even more curious visitors who wanted to see them.  The sheer gratitude, and manifest joy, of so many people I’d never met was revelatory, and as I encouraged children who showed interest (with their parents’ approval, of course) to participate, I felt a firmer connection to a public with these simple, realistic “portraits” than I have with most of the work that I consider so much more serious, and even important.

Not that there aren’t continuities between them, which fact actually delights and reminds me that there are ways that art can speak to every heart at every age with a power that can really change things, one life at a time.

In all of my work, I’ve been thinking about materials, how they get to be “materials,” and what our use of them signifies.  And I’ve shown a distinct preference for the ephemeral, the despised, the so ubiquitous that we no longer see it at all, materials implicit with the deaths they contain, or which imply death’s imminence: flesh, animal “by-products” of the slaughter industry, dead insects, taxidermized animals, human ashes, bodily effluvia, rust, etc.

And I have always been thinking about the morality of our notions of economy, the exploitation of nature, the ease with which we fail to see the horrors that are right in front of us, the willingness with which we simply ignore them, and other more rarified concerns relating more intimately to the nature of art itself, the relationship of knowledge and beauty, for example, or the means by which it signifies at all.

While making the bears, I couldn’t help remembering Karl Marx’s “everything that is solid melts into air,” the fate not only of the snow sculptures (which I and a group of musician friends acknowledged in a “funeral” event when spring reclaimed them for the earth), but, in all likelihood, of the bears (as a species) themselves, and perhaps of human beings as well.  I definitely felt that now is a time to make what is obvious obvious, that to prevail on the dialectic of the subtle and the horrific that has animated most of my bodies of work is just too slow, and, though I never thought of it that way before, too quiescent, or too contemplative, when the future is so dire and so near at hand.

In much of my work, I offer an overtly appealing, or even ordinary (and therefore consoling, comforting) surface, though I am really putting murder or the brute fact of death before my viewers.  And here, too, as if for children, and it is for children, I show the delight of nature in its inherent transience, one that will be artificially accelerated by the hand of man, the hand of man which also does these sweet, affectionate, respectful homages even as it’s killing the thing it “honors” with its “work”; the joyous, child-like aspect of the image versus the terrible truth it bears.