Perfecting the imperfections of nature with Jason DeMarte
Addressing consumer desire, skewed perceptions and our perversion of the natural world
The perfectly manicured rainbow of flowers in your backyard is not nature. The apples you eat did not grow so sweet and so juicy on their own. Botanists have spent generations carefully cross-breeding fruits, vegetables and ornamental plants to be desirable commodities.
Jason DeMarte was shooting landscapes inside a natural history museum and couldn’t shake the thought that what we perceive as nature isn’t really natural at all. The view through a car window or through a tv screen has been manipulated to appeal to our idealized interpretation of what the natural world should be like. Entire industries thrive by fulfilling our demand for bigger and brighter and newer, a demand nurtured by entire industries packaging and selling airbrushed visions of perfection. It impacts the environment. It impacts food. It infects our very DNA.
DeMarte creates reflections of nature as pristine and impossible as any natural history museum diorama. These serene scenes of flowers and butterflies are sweetened by showers of sugary treats, but nothing can distract you from the menacing skies above. Our interventions in the natural order have consequences.
One thing I particularly like about DeMarte’s work is how invested he is in the process. He grows his own flowers and raises caterpillars from eggs. His backyard is filled with bird-feeders and remote camera triggers. He listens to audiobooks on botany and environmental science while he painstakingly edits photos and composites them together in perfect harmony.
And whenever possible he and his family pack up the camper to spend a little time in the ugly unspoiled scraggily wilderness full of bugs and dirt and mangy animals that you’ll never in someone’s backyard, or in a city park, or in the pages of a glossy travel magazine.
There’s a little taste of the article below. You can read the entire profile at Create.
DeMarte’s twin projects, Confected and Adorned, offer romanticized tableaux populated by impossibly perfect birds, insects, and flowers, all thriving in bucolic harmony under gentle showers of sugary treats. In reality, the works are digital compositions of DeMarte’s photography, each visual element painstakingly edited into an uncanny nature display.
“We’re adorning everything,” he notes. “We’re making everything much more extravagant than it would be in its natural state. Whether that’s candy or whether that’s peonies, we’re doing it to everything,” he says. “When you go to a garden or when you’re sitting on your lawn, you don’t understand that none of this is natural,” he continues. “This has all been manipulated by us.” He sees a conceptual relationship to candy: “It’s this innocent-looking thing but it has this insidious manipulation behind it.”
The birds and butterflies are species that today only exist in cohabitation with people. The flowers have been cross-bred to perfection by generations of botanists. DeMarte grows or finds everything near his Michigan home, but even those locally sourced specimens are in some way the product of human intervention, either by accident or by agricultural geneticists and processed food chemists.
Please read the full article at Create.
