The Great Flounder of Babylon (2016) Ink on PaperThe Great Flounder is a symbolic avatar of the worldwide ecosystem--a seemingly adversarial realm of constant cutthroat competition. Yet closer study of ecology reveals that living things are far more dependent on each other than the predator/prey relationship makes it seem. If a flounder eats a shrimp, the world moves on. If all of the shrimp vanish, or if all of the flounder are fished out of the ocean, other dominoes begin to fall and the whole web of life starts to dwindle and fold inwards.
This brings us to humankind, a worldwide collective of cunning primate colonies which are in ferocious violent competition with each other.
If there were ever an aymmetrical animal, t’is surely us. Our history and our science have given us a unique place in the world ecosphere--but we are not dealing well with our new prominence. This piscine artwork reflects our past and our present. In the flounder’s tragicomic eyes we can perhaps glimpse our future of glory, grandeur, and doom. Heav'n from all creatures hides the book of fate,
All but the page prescrib'd, their present state:
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:
Or who could suffer being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flow'ry food,
And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.
Oh blindness to the future! kindly giv'n,
That each may fill the circle mark'd by Heav'n:
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
An Essay on Man: Epistle I, Alexander Pope