in conversation with Maria Lux

Artist Statement:
I’m a research-driven artist who centers my work on animals and their relationship to human knowledge. I work across disciplines, building my projects from specific topics like the spread of zoonotic diseases and accidental near-extinction of vultures, failed domestication attempts with racoons and ornery Roomba vacuum cleaners, parachuting poison-laced dead mice into tree canopies to combat invasive snakes, or the tension between popular science and expertise through the charismatic, microscopic water bear. These stories all necessarily investigate animals in correlation to the larger scientific, ecological, and cultural systems that they are a part of.

My work revolves around animals as important subjects in their own right, as well as the implications that animals, and the knowledge we gain through them, have on human conceptions of gender and family, race, class, colonization and globalization, power and equity, and ecology and interdependency. Though animals have only recently been taken seriously as more than just symbol and raw material in contemporary art (and scholarship in general), my work paradoxically uses “unserious” approaches like absurdity, humor, cuteness, horror, darkness, wonder, or narrative to bring complex subject of "the animal" into view.

I use a variety of materials and processes in my work, ranging from carving a large-scale hog, casting fruit bats that look like chandelier crystals, and making videos of a dollhouse being flooded in an aquarium tank, to making a stop-motion animation of a miniature parade, sewing stuffed prairie dogs, or turning a gallery into a 1960’s department store, as well as making artist books, drawings, collages, essays, and comics. These many pieces typically come together in an installation format, which I see as similar to a more traditional academic argument, with objects and images in place of quotes and analysis. I see my work as part of a larger dialogue that looks to both animals as a subject, and art-making as an approach, to contribute alternative ways to think and know.


Artist Bio
​Maria Lux earned her BFA from Iowa State University in 2006 and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012. She has shown work throughout the United States, including solo shows at Antenna Projects in New Orleans, LA, and Upfor Gallery in Portland, OR. She is a recipient of a McMillen Foundation fellowship, and recent residencies include Stove Works in Chattanooga, TN, and Cow House Studios in Ireland. As a cross-disciplinary artist, Lux also regularly presents her work at academic conferences around the world—from Finland and the UK to Kentucky and Texas. Lux is a member of the artist-run gallery space Carnation Contemporary in Portland, OR, and is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA.

Collages and prints
-Accidental Experiment, collage
-Screen capture from “Nature is Healing” memes, 2020
-Isolation, Collage with images of Hanford workers uncovering radioactive material and healthcare workers during COVID
-Droppings, collage
-Screen capture from “Nature is Healing” memes, 2020
-Get Well Soon, collage
-Clean up time is all the time, collage
-Screen capture from “Nature is Healing” memes, 2020
-Unseen, collage
-Screen capture from “Nature is Healing” memes, 2020
-Safe Behind the Glass, #Blessed, collage
-#Nature is Healing, collage
-Looking on the sunny side #bioremdiation #nature is healing #silverlining

Mylar balloons, silver mylar emergency blanket

Nature is Healing (to us)
Hospital curtain with print made from collaged materials (photographs of elk from government reports on elk herds at Hanford, the entombed C-plant at Hanford, and Hudson River School paintings), and hospital-green fabric

Control Panel
Jackrabbit taxidermy forms, cotton balls, hospital green paint, wood and buttons

Get Well Soon
Floating shelf, get-well bouquet of sunflowers and sagebrush, clock, tile, in hospital green

Screen captures from “Nature is Healing” memes, 2020

Radiography/Radioactivity
X-ray light box, tiles, collages with images from National Geographic, still frames from video at the National Museum of Atomic Testing in Las Vegas, NV

Safety within glass, #VitrificationPlant 
Plastic drum, glass, lights, silver mylar emergency blanket

Borderless Zone
Tumbleweed, cottontail rabbit taxidermy form, plexiglass, collages of tumbleweeds on “Alphabet Houses” plans from the town of Richland, Washington

No Man’s Land
Silver mylar balloons, list of acronyms and abbreviations included in the Hanford Site Biological Resources Management Plan, Prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management, postcards