Angela Gram Portrays Animals as Dispersed and Surreal Forms

With the rise of technology, experiencing the natural world in modern society has become almost completely irrelevant. New Jersey based painter Angela Gram portrays this tension between nature and humanity in her paintings of dispersed animals. As animals become less relevant to our every day or apparent needs, we lose our connection to them entirely, to the point where they become like figments of our imaginations. She represents this idea by deconstructing the animal body. Tropical birds, black panthers, and river dolphins are just a few of the exotic species that she distorts as if their forms were disappearing into thin air. Most of her images are chaotic and almost completely lacking of the animal’s identity, reduced to a visual collage of stripes or feathers. “The animals of these paintings are meant to symbolize such ambiguity as their identities disperse into uncanny and surreal forms. Yet these paintings also seek passionately to evoke the richness and complexity of the natural world with attention to rendering minute detail and appreciation for dynamic composition and color,” she says.