Ruckus goes space-age on wildlife art

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

By Henry Sweets

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Two giraffes with mechanical gills, maybe on mars, pose for the camera. A turtle swims through the industrial post-apocalypse as a weird algal organism clings to it.

These two scenes from “Mechanicals,” a series of paintings by Benji Pierson that will be hanging at the Brew Pub for the next month, show otherwise recognizable animals using mechanical appendages in futuristic landscapes.

It is the show you might expect from an artist who grew up doodling robots and storm troopers in Seattle before moving to Jackson Hole, the land of wildlife art, eight years ago.

I caught up with Pierson, who goes by Ruckus, in his studio/bedroom as he was putting the finishing touches on the armor of a chrome Armadillo for “mechanicals.”
Cans of spray-paint, paint pens and white-out neatly cluttered his desk. He worked with force-field focus until I started asking too many questions.

“You gotta’ put it away before you f@#$ it up,” Ruckus said as he pushed his desk away and hung the painting on his wall, next to the five or so posters from his old hip-hop group Minds Roman. He had lost inspiration for the evening.

Like a graffiti tagger or a kid who completed entire drawings of space-age worlds during most 50-minute high-school bells, Pierson draws in spurts of inspiration. He jokes sometimes about his ADD, and drawing robots after taking Ritalin as a kid, which helps explain his style. It relies on pure stream-of-consciousness inspiration. His ability to create a space-age landscape in front of your eyes is uncanny.

But for his new series, Mechanicals (which will eventually include 26 animals – one for each letter of the alphabet) Ruckus was looking for different subject matter, something with continuity and an artistic purpose.

“It’s a study in conformity, really,” Ruckus said. “Everybody has a spirit animal, everybody relates themselves to an animal … I want to see if people relate better to the objects they know instead of the abstract stuff I draw, like spaceships and robots.”

A turtle for wisdom, an elephant for its memory, a buffalo for strength and a rhinoceros for stability and stamina, Ruckus chose animals that are ascribed human powers. By drawing them mechanically – with gadgetry as organs – those characteristics are exaggerated.

What results is a new angle on wildlife art. It tweaks viewers’ imaginations about technology, nature and how people might channel the energy of a totem animal in a hyper-stimulated, hyper-technological world. It fits with a huge body of art growing around the world that explores the confluence of technological and organic entities and how they both survive and benefit from one-another.

Ruckus usually works with one or two colors on a monochromatic background. The look strikes a chord with a lot of viewers who like simply delivered images and the expedient feel of urban graffiti-based art. But with Ruckus’ work I typically like to see a little more color, which is why his two giraffes are my favorite works.

And on a theoretical level, the art got me thinking about which animal I related to and what characteristics I’d like to take from them. PJH

The show will open 6 p.m. Thursday at the Brew Pub, with a free keg for as long as it lasts.

Courtesy photo
Benji “Ruckus” Pierson puts the finishing touches on his mechanical vision of a sea turtle.

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Ruckus goes space-age on wildlife art | Planet JH News Article: Arts Beat

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