The Skinny Showcase: Kit Leffler

The plurality of the word nature sets a platform for my interest in it: nature is at once environment and behaviour, reality and originality. My work finds inspiration in nature.
I question the natural and artificial through appropriation, alteration and manipulation of digital images, recalling the worlds of advertising and science fiction. My work investigates the concept of human dominion over the natural environment. I ask,
What do we owe other animals and/or our environment? 
Why do we [humans] disassociate ourselves from mammalia? 
What does our human conception of the environment say about us as animals?
Visual anthropology plays a primary role in my work as a result of my methods. My work uses images from my anthropological period  – or experience – to create a dream of the apocalypse. In selecting and identifying pictures for appropriation I implement visual anthropological methods.
By using these methods during the process of appropriation, I identify the period within which I exist: a period where a photograph captioned Chicken Nuggets Are Made of this Pink Goop gets 125,613 blog hits, where soft toy tigers outnumber real tigers, where YouTube videos of tsunamis go viral, and where the last Pinta Giant Tortoise waits for its inevitable extinction. 
This imagery saturation forces the viewer to consider the ‘big picture’. As a result, authenticity and, subsequently, truth are brought into question. In working with visual artifice I can communicate a panic for our future nature, questioning our perception of and role within the natural world. In this way, my interest in nature brings into question humanity’s second nature.
 
Selected for the Society of Scottish Artists Annual exhibition, January 2012
2011 Frans Masereel Centre one-week printmaking residency
MFA (Distinction) in Printmaking from Edinburgh College of Art 2011
BFA (Hons) in Intermedia from the University of Kansas 2008
Leffler currently lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland. She will be moving to Minneapolis, Minnesota in Aug 2011
kitleffler.wordpress.com