ISABELLA KIRKLAND
(Originally published in Grand Street 71 – Spring 2003)

“Drawing inspiration from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes, California painter Isabella Kirkland has created a series seductive ruminations on wealth, biological diversity and our voracious and often fetishistic relationship with the natural world. “Taxa” (from the Greek taxis meaning order) comprises four [now six] sumptuous arrangements of meticulously rendered, anatomically accurate, life-size plants and animals set aglow by rich dark backgrounds. With their luscious colors and high-gloss finishes, these elaborate oil paintings celebrate decorative beauty while at the same time delivering a disturbing narrative of environmental degradation and homogenization.

Descendant (1999) is a memento mori to some of the many species that have been endangered by human activity.  In the painting’s counterpoint, Ascendant (2000), a perfectly ordinary orange house cat stares confidently out from beneath a large array of flora and fauna, all of which are species that have overtaken the habitats into which they’ve been introduced. On the left, a delicate feather drops from a mongoose’s mouth, alluding to that animal’s disastrous introduction to Hawaii, where it was meant to kill off rats brought ashore by foreign ships. The diurnal mongoose rarely crossed paths with the nocturnal rat; instead, it feasted on the indigenous Ne-Ne bird until that species neared the point of extinction. 

Trade (2001) and Collection (2002) address the effects of commerce and scientific study on the natural world. In Trade, a large tusk carved with a parade of elephants arcs across the canvas; perched nearby are birds whose frothy plumes were a turn-of-the-century fashion obsession. Collection features plants and animals that excite our desire to possess–the horn of a black rhino used to make dagger handles; the jaws of a great white shark, which can bring up to $10,000 on the black market. These works are true natures mortes, showing lives endangered or cut short in pursuit of precisely the kind of drawing room luxury this style of genre painting originally typified. 

In resurrecting this style, Kirkland also draws a sly parallel between our own intoxicatingly prosperous era, with its bursting speculative bubbles, and a time –some three and a half centuries before the term “biodiversity” was coined– when a frenzy for rare varieties of tulip turned the Dutch economy upside down.”

By SUSAN EMERLING