CIVIL MONSTERS DRAWING SERIES, 2001

This drawing series was an exploration concerned with the seminile idea of what it means to be "civilized". When Mahatma Gandhi was asked by a journalist about his opinions of western civilization, he replied, "I think it would be a good idea."

On a broader scale of this idea, I find myself unable to reconcile a perfect civilization with the way 'civilized' humanity has been approaching problems over the ages. I have felt an affinity with writers like George Orwell, author of the novel 1984, and a sense of believability that civilization is on its way to a collision course with totalitarian rule in all sectors of life. My images do not intend to show the future of humankind in some sort of biologically altered state, but rather to personify aspects of what we have held and still hold so dearly as "civilization".

In Daniel Quinn's novel, Ishmael, he shows a disparity between the unnatural state of civilization and the natural state of population control in the community of all other living things. When totalitarian agriculture began being practiced in the Fertile Crescent approximately 10,000 years ago, the population of humans began its steady exponential growth.

At present, we have endangered, or made extinct, many other species on the planet and will undoubtedly run out of resources and room to sustain our own species. We, as civilized humans, have managed to pollute, conquer, kill, and try to control everything in our path in a relatively short segment of earth's history.

Those 'primitive' or aboriginal peoples, while there are few left in scattered groups across the globe, have lived in balance with the world for what anthropologists now believe to be three million years. How civilized are we in terms of sustainable lifestyles? The present course and standards of "civilization", it has been speculated, will not be sustainable for another fifty years. When our children take up arms in schools, or our tuna is polluted with chemicals, I don't think we should be surprised. We are like any other species that is threatened with its own extinction, except that we maintain we are civil and somehow different than the rest. We are the most Civil of all Monsters.