In my work, I study the craft and meaning behind functional pictures that convey a practical and educational purpose. My latest research is an open-ended series of drawings, comics, and objects, based on tropes, visions, and techniques used in 20th-century paleoart and naturalist illustration. This considers a closer look at the graphic languages and archetypal figures imposed on animals by European colonialism and their impact on the visual narratives in today’s popular science.
Extinction is a constant presence in the series, inhabiting multiple temporalities: as an underlying narrative of impending doom; as a current moment; or as an event already in the past, waiting to be reconstructed. Motivated by thoughts on representation, conservation, and resurrection of animal ecosystems, I weigh on past and future worlds where animals have only survived as pictures.
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Felipe Muhr (1986) is a visual artist from Santiago (CL). He has developed a research based on an expanded notion of drawing and its narrative possibilities, including painting, comics, publications, and installations. Felipe holds a degree in Art from PUC (CL), an MFA in Illustration from FIT, State University of NY (US), and more recently Advanced Master in Artistic Research at Sint Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp. Felipe has worked as an illustrator for more than a decade, drawing for newspapers, magazines, educational textbooks, and public museums. This has allowed him to learn and apply the vocabulary of illustration, using drawing as a way of thinking to raise questions about the role and meaning of pictures in nonfiction and pedagogical contexts.
