Andrea Bergen’s Art Hands the World Over to Its Scrappiest Scavengers

What do you think would happen if raccoons inherited the Earth?

San Francisco artist Andrea Bergen posits that they’d be racing around on monster trucks, chowing down human snacks, slurping energy drinks and riding animatronic horses outside convenience stores. And if the content of her new exhibit, Modern Menagerie — a group show at The Drawing Room Annex with Fuzz E. Grant and Richard Menendez — is anything to go by, these trash pandas would also revel in hanging with their friends. (Those pals being possums, rats, pigeons and the occasional escaped zoo animal, naturally.)

Bergen’s image of Earth in the future is one in which humanity has been erased, leaving behind tacky monuments to convenient living, and clearing a path for urban animals to run entirely unimpeded. Hers is a hypercolor, gleefully unhinged landscape where a rat can casually eat a Slim Jim while watching a fight between a seagull and a snake. This is a place where a (literal) vulture opts to raise its offspring inside a broken TV set. In this world, when aliens finally do invade, they concern themselves only with getting drunk on cheap liquor, letting their tiny green babies ride around on possums, and abducting cute dogs.

“This is kind of my way of dealing with the idea of climate change and how horrible it is,” Bergen tells KQED Arts, “and proposing this alternate future where everything is going to be okay — for the animals at least.”

Compounding the unusual nature of her compositions is the medium in which Bergen most likes to work: paper and gel medium. The Oakland-born California College of the Arts graduate constructs her art by hand cutting intricate shapes one by one, out of colored paper. She does this using very sharp scissors, then lays those pieces down, slowly building them into complex and texturally wondrous scenes.

“It’s just more satisfying [for me] than painting,” Bergen explains. “I really wanted a graphic quality that I feel too impatient to achieve with paint. The paper gives an immediate saturation and opacity.”

Bergen does not, she reassures KQED Arts, ever pre-cut paper before she’s ready to apply it, and she very rarely uses blades to achieve her clean edges. This painstaking process creates minuscule details that work together to mind-bending overall effect.

Not all of Bergen’s intricate moves are immediately obvious to the viewer; they’re even tougher to capture and convey in photographs. In person though, her compositions act like a sort of Where’s Waldo? for grown-ups — except this time, the final goal is pure, hero-less anarchy and hedonistic chaos for the hell of it. And no wonder. The way Bergen designs her pieces is often off the cuff.

“I’ll block out the big things on the surface that I’m working on,” Bergen explains, “but then it’s improvisational. I just fill up the whole thing until it feels finished.”

More recently, Bergen has expanded her output by creating highly unusual sculptures out of cardboard and papier-mâché. These figures are her artworks brought to surreal, hilarious, 3D life. Modern Menagerie includes three giant flying pigeons carrying snacks to their destinations, a huge seated donkey, a wall-climbing tiger, a mischievous goat, a mandrill (with a very special bright red rear end), a raccoon eating a big burger and a bug-eyed, Monster Energy-drinking chihuahua.

“It’s kind of a distillation of humanity’s footprint on nature,” Bergen says, “and how I envision the future after we’re gone.”

If the animals do one day inherit the Earth and it’s anything like Bergen’s vision, their future will be uproarious.

‘Modern Menagerie,’ featuring work by Andrea Bergen, Fuzz E. Grant and Richard Menendez opens at The Drawing Room Annex (599 Valencia St., San Francisco) on Nov. 30, 2024 at 5 p.m. The show runs through Jan. 12, 2025.