"To respond to an animal in Harrison’s imagined world is to grasp how closely its existence is linked with that of all the others."
-Carter Ratcliff

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Excerpts:

"Harrison’s three-dimensional animals float in imperturbable repose and those in her paintings mostly regard us with utter calm. A few, with teeth bared, may well be poised for ferocious leaps. Still, her world is not an arena of Darwinian conflict. It is an ecosystem of intuitable meanings, of empathies intertwined. The paintings belong to a series the artist launched in 1993, which she calls Animals in the Anthropocene — animals in the time of human dominion, a title that could be understood as an indictment, given all that the human race has done to harm animals through environmental and other kinds of disruption.

However, the mood of Harrison’s art is not prosecutorial. Rather than send us messages about the damage we have inflicted on our world and its inhabitants, including ourselves, she confronts us with images and effigies of creatures whose beings are as complex as our own, and thus as valuable. She does this in the faith that, in coming alive to all that is vital in these figures, we will realize that the vitality of an individual creature is not enclosed within itself."

"An empathetic connection to a single being withers unless we weave it into a network of further connections with myriad beings. To respond to an animal in Harrison’s imagined world is to grasp how closely its existence is linked with that of all the others. Thus, she refreshes our insight into the interdependence of living things — and our understanding of life’s dependence on the real world, which, in the Anthropocene period, needs every insightful action we can take."
 

The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) has announced Jan Harrison as the first-ever recipient of its Recharge Foundation Fellowship for New Surrealist Art. The award is supported by funding granted to NYFA by the Gu Family of The Recharge Foundation, a private non-profit organization that aims to promote cross-cultural preservation and create dialogues around visual and jewelry art. Harrison, who lives in Kingston, NY, is a painter and sculptor whose work involves empathy with the animal nature and animal/human interface as it relates to the collective psyche. Since 1979, her art has been connected with the philosophy of deep ecology and is focused on the vulnerability of endangered species.

“We’re thrilled to recognize Jan Harrison with the inaugural Recharge Foundation Fellowship, and are thankful to the Gu Family for their support of individual artists,” said Michael L. Royce, Executive Director, NYFA. “Harrison’s work, while rooted in Surrealist tradition, speaks very much to the present as we navigate complex relationships with nature and our own human struggles to survive. We hope that this award acknowledges her outstanding work and furthers her explorations in the New Surrealist style.”