Most of my work is around endangered species and extinction. With all the concerns about COVID-19, people have started thinking about what would happen in an even worse pandemic and which creatures would survive an apocalypse. We can learn a lot from nature, when it comes to our current situation. The lessons of the past few months are as valuable as they were painful. There is no going back – in order to survive we need to evolve. It’s survival of the fittest, and normal is not part of our new future.
About a year ago, I made an interesting discovery while doing some research on the California Tiger Salamander, which is a native, endangered species in the Bay Area. The California Tiger Salamander started breeding with the invasive Barred Tiger Salamander and produced a hybrid of the two. The hybrid is a hopeful monster, that is more likely to survive than either parent species.
I was so fascinated by this idea, that I painted the cycle of evolution at the Redwood City Chalk Art Festival last year. This new species is among the first known sustainable populations of a hybrid animal. The life of a hybrid offspring is usually considered an evolutionary dead end, because the gene mixture with other species don't usually produce healthy, fit offspring – but this combination of genes seems to work and provides a sustainable future for this species.
Because of the pandemic, Redwood City asked artists to work from home this year. So I painted in front of my art studio in San Francisco. I had never done an interactive 3D painting before. It was a unique opportunity to try something new and to stretch the idea. Next to the salamander hybrids I painted a California Poppy plant that pops up everywhere and may even become weedy and displace other local flowers. The Mission Blue Butterfly stands in harsh contrast. It lost most of its grassland to development in the Bay Area and became one of the first insects added to the federal endangered species list in 1976.
By adding San Francisco in a bottle, I tell the city’s Covid-19 crisis story. San Francisco is sealed inside, which allows the city to continue forever in dreams, even when the city is falling apart in reality. It’s like an archeological find from another time that got dug out of a sinkhole. San Francisco became a vacuum - a safe space for creatives and people who think different, but the downside is that you can’t breathe with the lack of atmosphere. If we look closely at the city, we see all the light shining through the cracks. The inequality is harder to ignore than ever since the Coronavirus outbreak. The shelter-in-place is hurting small businesses everywhere, but especially the artists. Lots of my friends started fundraiser campaigns or created online shops for their business. The fight for survival focuses on new business strategies and innovative start-up models. We worried about invasive tech firms that might displace the local businesses, but with hybridization we don’t lose the existing community because it is driven to extinction by competition, but because it is mixed with one another.
It’s a very surreal atmosphere - like a post-apocalypse without the actual apocalypse. I don’t have a new game plan for the post-pandemic world. I am lucky that people feel strongly about me and I still get referrals and new opportunities. But we all have to transform and evolve. It is the age of extinction of whole industries and digital mutations, you can only hope that you are one of the rare success stories. Natural selection can quickly replace you if your competitors are better adapted to the new normal than you. Some may say the situation is an evolution process and will strengthen us, others will consider hybrids as a potential threat to our profession. But there is no question, that there will be an increasing number of hybrids - of hopeful monsters - to be discovered in the future.