What do you think would happen if raccoons inherited the Earth?
San Francisco artist Andrea Bergen posits that they’d be racing around on monster trucks, chowing down human snacks, slurping energy drinks and riding animatronic horses outside convenience stores. And if the content of her new exhibit, Modern Menagerie — a group show at The Drawing Room Annex with Fuzz E. Grant and Richard Menendez — is anything to go by, these trash pandas would also revel in hanging with their friends. (Those pals being possums, rats, pigeons and the occasional escaped zoo animal, naturally.)
Bergen’s image of Earth in the future is one in which humanity has been erased, leaving behind tacky monuments to convenient living, and clearing a path for urban animals to run entirely unimpeded. Hers is a hypercolor, gleefully unhinged landscape where a rat can casually eat a Slim Jim while watching a fight between a seagull and a snake. This is a place where a (literal) vulture opts to raise its offspring inside a broken TV set. In this world, when aliens finally do invade, they concern themselves only with getting drunk on cheap liquor, letting their tiny green babies ride around on possums, and abducting cute dogs.
“This is kind of my way of dealing with the idea of climate change and how horrible it is,” Bergen tells KQED Arts, “and proposing this alternate future where everything is going to be okay — for the animals at least.”
Compounding the unusual nature of Bergen’s compositions are the materials she most likes to work with: paper and gel medium. The Oakland-born California College of the Arts graduate constructs her art by hand cutting intricate shapes one by one, out of colored paper. She does this using very sharp scissors, then lays those pieces down, slowly building them into complex and texturally wondrous scenes.
