Bio
James Connolly is a multidisciplinary and multimedia artist who desires to explore the modern world through an anthropological lens. He is also a documentary filmmaker with a focus on food systems, cycles of poverty, and environmental issues. Connolly’s documentaries, six in total, include Transmilitary, which received the Audience Award at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival. Connolly is the founder of a nonprofit venture targeting systems change in agriculture, diet, and nutrition education, and has worked with the White House in Washington, D.C. on policies in these areas.
The nature of Connolly’s art compels a relationship with the viewer, as well as a negotiation between means and end. The distinctive qualities of street photography, portraits, digital drawing, etching, and close observation of the natural world inform his choice of subject, as well as the substates for his work. Connolly’s latest projects are inspired by totems, symbols, and artifacts of modernity, as well as by a mechanistic worldview dominated by “The Information Age.”
Statement
‘Underwood’
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
– Stephen Jay Gould
“With every new technological innovation, we must reconcile ourselves with the loss of the stories and ideas of those left without the mechanics to tell them. My latest series explores many of the technological innovations of the Industrial Age meant to communicate ideas and manufacture consent.”
‘Copy After Evening’
“I was inspired by these lines from the Socialist and suffragette poem, Bread and Roses: ‘Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew. Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for Roses too’. ”
