Brian Longfield | Lives & Times: Conceptual Wildlife

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Brian Longfield, “Coyote on a cold night,” 2023

acrylic on found fabric (courtesy of the Galley)

An exploration of empathy, mortality and documentation as they pertain to the secret lives of animals. This exhibit collects work from my series of animal portraits and my trail camera paintings. I began my exploration of wildlife art by looking for subjects that were really real. Often wildlife art involves generalization of a species to a single type, or working from a constructed schema. I was looking for a near scientific degree of objectivity, at least conceptually, while still making painted images. This led me at first to making animal portraits, exploring the subjecthood of individual animals in a genre of painting derived from images of the historically powerful or important, and then to making paintings of photographs taken with a trail camera or camera trap. Both bodies of work maintain a relationship with scientific observation through painting. The Trail Camera paintings make use of a genre of photography used for the collection of data and which includes elements of that data, such as the temperature, date and time directly in the image and the animal portraits are accompanied by fictionalized zoological text panels.

Meet the Artist times: First Friday, 5pm to 9pm; Saturday, 12noon to 5pm. Additional times by request.