Our delicate balance to keep connected to nature is a theme that is on-going and will always be a question I ask myself. These paintings are the beginning of a series that will explore our relationship to nature and how we are constantly struggling to stay close to it.

This on-going exploration deals with slow decline of species due to climate change. I am making a series of portraits of animals that are extremely familiar, and very close to extinction. Some of the portraits will eventually become murals, while others will stay in the intimacy of small paintings. All are connected to a book that will be published in the near future.

Part fantasy, part reality and totally attainable. That is the goal with my Cosmic Vacation series. I love exploring other dimensions and looking at our world through a different lens. I look to the stars to help me to find answers, and into the depths of my cosmic soul for compassion and love. This on-going series will be made into a book for all of us to adventure along and find our own comic vacations.

This is a collection of some favorite commissions I have done over the years. Check back regularly, as I will update this every few months.

I've always been excited by how easy it is to take something old, transform it, and give it a new life. My Cosmic Animal Gloves are one of my favorite on-going projects where I get to play with the idea of old and new, symmetry and our strange connection to the cosmic world of spirit animals. These darlings are hand-painted, museum-quality framed and unique in every possible way. I’ve been making them for over a decade, and I often have a set for sale in my studio, so please contact me for more details: bunniereiss@gmail.com

This is the story of a year where grief and fear almost swallowed all of us. 

In the depths of soft imagination, retreating into one’s psyche seemed the only option to protect while dealing with the concern and confusion coming from almost every direction. Walls were seemingly going up everywhere, and the constant nagging thought of recovery seemed impossible. We needed something big to pull us all out, something complete. 

I began fantasizing about our own special set of Imaginal cells, and how they might be the answer. Our unique and beautiful bug soup could save us all. We could retreat, dissolve, and come out completely new, all the way down to our gooey cellular form. Our souls might just be saved and rise up from land to somewhere in the stars. We could go back to the basics of kindness, compassion, a deeper understanding of the human condition, and reread all the ancient books given to us by Mother Nature.

So we built this idea of a beautiful, floating world, this gift, my offering of just a sliver of what our new future could look like. Where boats are spaceships, the insides of trees are full of glitter, and nature has begun to regrow, stronger and more beautiful than ever. We will learn how to fly, how to communicate just by looking directly into the eyes of another human being. No words, no gestures, just deep understanding, full of warmth and remembering.

If nostalgia is the pain from an old wound, than perhaps we are the soothsayer surgeons, time-traveling archetypes, the one’s that are still learning, but already have a deeper understand of how to fix it all.

When we put all the pieces back together, it will be bigger than anything we could  ever imagine. Its time for us to stop remembering what we think we know, and instead start paying attention to the things we have forgotten.

If stars are souls watching down upon the Earth,
than we are never alone. 

Through an understanding of Plato’s Cosmology, this body creates a new tale of the universe where characters become the stars (both metaphorically and literally) that build our world around us. With a combination of symmetry, disorder, nature, emotion, memory and movement, we can begin to develop our own stories, our own ideas and our own hopes on how we want our world to be created. We can look up at the sky, see our companion stars, and understand that there will always be another world waiting for us. 

In this world of constant expansion of technology, how do we go back and behave like our trueanimal selves? How do we continue to go by instinct? To find courage in a time and space where our connection seems to be forced by computer keys and tiny, glowing screens that show us a world that exists behind a pixelated force. This new work is a story of us, of all our nature, of how we can find our brave selves again and come into the beasts that we are, without fear, without hesitation. It is the complicated simplicity of being the human animal, with our abilities to reason ourselves right out of our true nature. I want us to remember before we could remember where our nature came from, how we all lived in harmony, how we survived on the trees, the air, and the soft moss under our hoofs. 

The great folks at PSKaufman (http://www.pskaufman.com/) invited me to paint a mural in their lovely LA Studio, along with a custom line of shoes and bags. Not only does Paul Kaufman make an excellent pair of shoes (remember Doc Martens?), but he really loves collaborating with different artists and allowing them to use his shoes as a canvas. A few pairs of these, along with some bags, are still available! If you're in the DTLA area, stop by and say hello!

These are some of my most personal paintings to date. They reflect a year of major cosmic self-exploration, compassion, animal spirit and the primal need to feel close to others. This body of work is still open and will continue to be updated regularly. 

I was honored to be awarded the St. Vincent Du Paul artist in residence in East Oakland at their transfer station. I spent 4 months digging through the donations and making art at the on-site studio. I had just arrived home from 2 previous months traveling in India, and the residency gave me time and space to make work based on my travels. The unwinding from the trip combined with the strange bits of living history coming through the transfer station made my storytelling very interesting. The final show at Redux Studios & Gallery was a huge success, and I am grateful to the the curator Chris Rummell and the hard working staff at the gallery for all of their support.

I often feel somewhere in between things. I'm not quite in one spot all the time, but also I'm exactly where I need to be. This kind of thrilling tension keeps me fueled in many different ways. The work created for this show reflected my constant need to go back and forth between these two places and honor the experience and people I meet along the way. Thank you again to Chris Rummell for being such a wonderful curator and supporter of my artistic path.

'Binding' was a wonderful collaborative project I did with my dear friend Loren Erdrich (http://okloren.com/home.html). We had met several years before at a residency program in Vermont and wanted to create a show together where we could find the intersection where our hearts and work met. I did a Kickstarter to support relocating to Brooklyn to be close to Loren, and than took us both to Detroit to do the show. It was a true collaboration, where the work looked like a 3rd party had made it, and had bits of myself and Loren combined together perfectly. Thank you to Alison Wong and John Charnota at Butter Projects for taking a chance on this project and giving us such a beautiful gallery space to work in. 

'Go Gently' was executed in 2 different spaces over a 6 month period. These paintings are just a small sampling of the larger installation, which included quilts, over-sized birdhouses, nests, huge curtains, magic slippers and a smattering of other strange objects that told a tale of a gentle world that lived slightly further than I could reach. Please visit the installation portion of my site to see the full photos.

I did a large, 3-room collaborative show with Monica Canilao, where we spent 6 months working back and forth between our studios and building a magical world that practically devoured the gallery space. These are a few of the pieces we made together, but you can check out the installation portion of my site to see more in-depth pictures of the entire space. 

Here are also a few videos done about the show:

https://vimeo.com/32127566

https://vimeo.com/32001191

'She had alot of luck' was based on my experience in allowing ourselves to be lucky and tap into a collective magic. I wanted everyone to feel like they were kids again and that seeing the stars rise over and over was something spectacular instead of expected.