Anima/Animus (2019 – present)
“Both the light we seek and the shadows that we fear are projected from within.”
-Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe
The series’ title is informed by Carl Jung’s ideas about personality. Jung identified the unconscious feminine side of a man as the anima and the unconscious masculine side of a woman as the animus.
Although those terms inspired the series’ name, the drawings aren’t about femininity and masculinity, per se; rather, I started the body of work while pondering our species’ affection for grossly simplified Cartesian dualisms: feminine/masculine, emotion/reason, subject/object, body/mind, nature/culture, animal/human. These dichotomies are thousands of years old and have fundamentally shaped Western thought, but longevity and utility don’t necessarily make ideas right or just. We know, for example, that culture is a facet of nature, reasoning is inextricably tied to emotion, the mind and body function in concert, and humans are animals…yet we continue to project archetypes to defend our legacy assumptions and values.
What forms emerge when we candidly survey our dark interior? What beasts take shape in the shadows?
