August 29th - October 10th
In collaboration with the White Wolf Wellness Foundation, RAM presents The Animal I Forgot I Was, a new body of work by Stephen Winters exploring the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world through painting, drawing, sound, observation, and lived experience.
The exhibition grows from Winters’ experience living within the riparian ecosystem of California’s Kern River, where daily observation of hawks, honeybees, owls, coyotes, rabbits, trees, water, and countless other forms of life has become a way of understanding the self as one animal among many. As an artist and licensed falconer, Winters brings thousands of hours of close observation of animals to the work, examining the intelligence, instinct, violence, vulnerability, and cooperation that shape both human and nonhuman life. “What began as observation gradually became participation—a way of understanding myself as one animal living among many.”
Through graphite drawing, painting, sound, and field observation, The Animal I Forgot I Was considers the boundary between human and nonhuman life and the point where one form begins to become another. Bees merge into swarms, animals disappear into grass, feathers become fields of marks, and trees take on the presence of bodies. Moving between close observation and abstraction, the works allow forms to emerge, dissolve, and reappear.
The exhibition’s monumental drawings further shift the viewer’s sense of scale and perspective. A hawk’s head becomes a landscape, a tree trunk becomes a body, and graphite moves between feather, shadow, atmosphere, and terrain.
At the center of The Animal I Forgot I Was is a larger question of what may have been forgotten by understanding humanity as separate from the rest of nature.
Stephen Winters (b. 1982, Rome, New York) is a Bakersfield-based artist whose work explores animal consciousness, ecological systems, and the boundary between organism and environment. Living and working along the Kern River, Winters draws from sustained observation, falconry, beekeeping, field recording, and land stewardship. His recent work centers on monumental graphite drawings in which animals, swarms, trees, and landscapes move between representation and abstraction, often dissolving into larger fields of pattern and movement. Winters received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007.