I Already Miss the Polar Bear
2008
Digital prints
39”h X 60”w
Using the overwhelming ramifications of global warming on the health of the planet as a jumping off point, I researched and thought about what we would lose if global warming continues and specifically if the polar bear becomes endangered/ extinct. How also would it affect most people considering the common ways people interact with or experience polar bears right now? Currently few humans have seen a polar bear in the wild, and most have only experienced them in photographs.
Now that we have an overwhelming plethora of representations of any given animal we also have a phantom feeling of experiencing that animal as we would in real life- anyone who has seen a photo of a polar bear thinks they have experienced a polar bear. In I already miss the Polar Bear I found images of polar bears and enlarged them almost to the point of abstraction. One image is from the internet, I appropriating a tiny web-sized image and enlarged it to show all of the missing data. The other I scanned from a book with such a large increase in size the printers dot matrix is exposed so that one can see all the gaps in the information that we might confuse as real experiences.