Biophilia: Jim Naughten

Jim Naughten’s new exhibition of enhanced and manipulated
photographic images interrogates our vital, if often strained,
relationship with the Natural World.

Deploying an AI imaging tool, together with his own stock of images
of historic dioramas, Naughten refashions the familiar, creating
images of animals that are, by turns, unsettling and beguiling. There
are brightly coloured monkeys and magnificently crested birds. They
play both with our anxieties about the impact of the modern world
upon the natural realm, and the extent to which our feelings for that
realm are founded upon nostalgic memory and imagination.

These are images of arresting beauty and great technical virtuosity.
They use the most modern methods, and address contemporary
concerns, but in their essence they reach back to the very core of
existence: man’s place in Nature.

BIOPHILIA is Naughten’s second one-person show at the Rebecca
Hossack Art Gallery. An exhibition of urgent importance, it continues
his rich and fruitful artistic engagement with the contested theme of
biodiversity and the environment.