Monarch

Desiree Dolron’s latest series, Monarch, is a meditation on, in the words of the artist, “the relationship between our planet’s fragile ecosystem and one of the greatest issues of our time; the human migration flows that are manifesting and growing all across the world.” 

The immediate subject of Dolron’s images is the North American Monarch butterfly and its extraordinary migration pattern. Every year Monarch butterflies undertake a multi-generational journey from southern Canada and the northern United States down to Mexico and back again. It is one of the most spectacular migrations in the natural world, but one, like so many, threatened by human activity, in this case by extensive habitat destruction along the migration route.

Employing an exquisite economy of expression, Dolron takes this fragile subject as a symbol for the themes of migration, scarcity and environmental degradation, imagined on the grandest of scales.

They are images, that are, in the midst of their natural beauty, urgent and foreboding.
 

-Nick Hackworth