Cameron Michel is an American artist and musician who was a member of the team that produced “Anti-Rabbit Art,” a mixed media installation created for the 2010 Multispecies Salon exhibit in New Orleans. In collaboration with Vashti Windish and Eben Kirksey, they brought together the grotesque and the beautiful, the twinned elements of Victor Hugo’s sublime, to make an artwork that invited the mind’s eye to fixate on the microprocesses and oblique powers involved in creating images that drive the speculative ventures of biocapitalism.
Two long filarial worms run down the center of the collage in a curlicue squiggle framing clouds in the center. Faint traces of Wolbachia populate a dark background of cells, like a night sky filled with colorful stars, while the raw flesh of a skinned rabbit looms large in the foreground. An actual rabbit, borrowed from a New Orleans breeder who raises animals for sale as pets and food, took up temporary residence in front of the piece drawing attention to pictures of glowing rabbits, transgenic animals with the jellyfish gene for Green Fluorescing Protein (GFP) gazing toward the horizon line.
Along with fellow artists, Vashti Winidish, Tania Ryalls and Bonnie Pipkin, Michel co-founded the Live With Animals Gallery in Brooklyn that presided over numerous art exhibitions, performance pieces, live music, and experimental theater. Michel’s own art consists of iconographic collages, usually made in collaboration with Windish, that skillfully engineer macrocosmic landscapes where the architectural and biological converge in impressive magnitude.
Working largely with his own intuition, the collages start from a blank canvas and are built piece by piece from images collected on his camera, found photos, books and other random ephemera. Other found objects in the form of paint, taxidermy, glitter and resins are also added to the work at a later stage. Through this process dynamic artworks of oblique symbolism are created, depicting surreal landscapes haunted by spectacular figures.
See also: Drosphila & Wolbachia
Further Reading
Kirksey, Eben et al. (2014) “The Age of Biotechnology” in The Multispecies Salon, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 193-196.
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