Biocitizenship

Wren Burgess (American, b. 1999)All the Piggy Pig Pig of a Pigs and their friends totally love drinking plastic, 2022, Acrylic, Ink, unstretched gessoed canvas, Kombucha skin for the mother and child, 144 x 66 inches

The artwork revolves around biocitizenship and how the roles of environmentalism and chronic illness are incorporated into it. I create humanoid characters called chimeras that interact with one another and are influenced by their experience in the anthropocene. By utilizing the chimera I am showing the dehumanization and lab rat treatment chronically ill and disabled people experience because of the hate shown by our society and government towards disabled individuals. With all these ideas intertwined the concept of biocitizenship is formed. Biocitizenship is the idea that our rights and access to resources are determined by our environmental state and physical health. Chronically ill people and the consequences of environmental destruction form an intersection that is biocitizenship. The environmental and medical themes in my work are also very relevant to our current time of us entering the climate crisis and that a large amount of people are now experiencing the horrors of being sick in a system that can't take care of them due to the covid pandemic. My chimeras exist in a grotesquely fantastical space that is shown in a magical realism fashion. Because these creatures navigate the in between of human and non human animals they instigate empathy for the terrorizing actions that other animals and the environment bear from human mass production and pollution. This is to show the impact that pollution has on our health and how our exposure to it impacts what we see, hear, and feel. My paintings narrate the effects of environmental destruction that humanity has inflicted on the Earth and how that impacts people’s health while living in the anthropocene.