''I am fascinated by representations of nature in mediated environments, and am particularly interested in ways in which people bring wilderness landscapes into domestic interiors, using flora and fauna, bouquets and bearskin rugs to amplify their personal identification with nature or, perhaps, with cultures of nature.
By considering our relationship with animal imagery and form, I am taking account of our empathic tendencies, both in the sense of the identification with and understanding of an "other, and in the sense of joining one's own feeling to an object.
To frame all these elements, I refer to periods and modes of domestic embellishment that seem to have invented their own peculiar links to an 'ordered' natural world, such as mid to late 19th century parlors, museums, and libraries, mid 20th century suburban rec rooms, and modern western rural homes.
No one really believes that they live within a natural world, or that bringing animal imagery or rough log walls into their home is anything but cosmetic. Where nature and culture collide in this way, so do pathos and pride, the recognition of the animal's mortality and the deferral of our own.
My current investigations reference the hierarchy of objects and architectural spaces in the late 17th C and the early 19th centuries. Creating installations that look at important time periods of cultural, scientific and artistic development and exploration, and how they have unfolded to shape and mold our current views of the macabre and mystical.''
David Ross Harper
David R. Harper is a Toronto born artist currently working in Chicago. Harper received his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2006 and is Currently working towards his MFA at the School of the Art institute of Chicago. Harper's installations, Which speak to the intersections of personal and universal mythologies, Loss, Identity and gender, are notable for their skillful mix of embroidery, taxidermy, and woodworking. Most recent Solo exhibitions include "Noblesse Oblige" at MKG127 Toronto, "Atlas" at Art Gallery of Acadia University and "Skin and Bone" at the Textile Museum of Canada as part of the umbrella exhibition "Person, Place, Thing".
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