Looking Back

No, not a retrospective navel-gazey post. "Looking Back" is the title of the one drawing I managed to get done in time for the Basic Inquiry members' show "Being Human" (running through Nov 28 at 901 Main Street, Vancouver, if you happen to be in that neighbourhood).  I don't usually need titles for my pictures, so it was a struggle, but I'm quite proud of the one I came up with.  As the eminent critic wrote:

"'Looking Back' is, at first glance, a gratuitously simple behavioural descriptive.  We are, it appears needless to declare, Looking (at a) Back. But as we look, we perceive ourselves to be looked upon, as the back itself is Looking Back - the prominent pelvic concavities become ocular, the sacral terminus and inter-gluteal cleft become nasal-buccal, and, dare we say?, ursine.  Unnerved by the threat of imminent predation, we are drawn upward by the subtle dorsal rotation to a threat of even greater peril, the transgression of our privileged post as anonymous observer: is the model Looking Back at us?   The unresolved nihilistic potential disorients us, and we are forced to face the most profoundly ontological Looking Back - the simple segmented spinal column, the gill-like costal ridges, the primitive sinistral appendage, what could these be but echoes, resonating in the rippled aqua pedestal and primordial darkness, ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, of our distant piscine ancestry, revealing that Being Human is, ultimately, Being a Fish."

Couldn't have put it better myself.