4ocj asked: what exactly do rainbows and sea otters symbolize/mean to you?

I (Dan) wrote a really long stream-of-consciousness statement for the show (which all this recent work is part of) explaining what it was about, but its probably more than you want to read.  Thankfully it was distilled by our gallery for the press release for the show.  This is part of it:

Notorious zoophiles, for this show Kozyndan had initially planned to create a visual ode to those species of the animal world being lost to extinction. Early into the production of work for this exhibition, while visiting Hawaii, the artists encountered an enormous rainbow flexing over the ocean, its awe-inspiring scale anchoring it in the realm of the truly sublime. Kozyndan experienced this manifestation as philosopher Emmanuel Kant, in his The Critique of Judgment (1790) describes such ineffable apparitions as calling forth ideas of limitlessness and totality. Truly discombobulated, Kozyndan felt the need to try to address this sense in their new body of work. 

Breaking Circles, Broken Light includes new sculptures and works on paper as a nuanced ode to taking delight in the beauty, form, and presence of the animals we live amongst, the myths we’ve formulated about them, and the joy they inspire. Yet the work is also heavy with the knowledge that the ties that bind us to animals, and the connections that hold us all together, are the same ones that humans are using to slowly strangle the life out of the world we share. In Leaving Encante, Amazon River boto dolphins are shown in their mythic form as shapeshifting ‘encantandos’ known to take human form and either beguile or terrify the people they encounter. In We Come Together To Make The World Fun! red pandas form a tight ring to conjure a spectral appearance out of the ether. Kozyndan beguile us with the gorgeous, charming, endangered, storied animals that populate these new works while simultaneously sounding a subtle and resonant call to action.  

I wouldn’t say there is a certain symbolic meaning in sea otters for us, it was one of many animals, mostly endangered or threatened, that we depicted for the exhibition, but the rainbow definitely revolves around some idea that we, as humans, are doing this all wrong and the universe is trying, in subtle ways, to communication with us, and we personally just wish we could decipher these messages.  Like most people though we are are just too disconnected with nature to understand. Oddly, its a melancholy message, but we often depict those kinds of messages in humorous, cute, or pretty ways.