Lessons in Taxidermy
In our Western "progress"- oriented culture, nature is represented through heavily mediated guises. Yet, at times, this could be necessary; Nature exists as a looming memento mori, a testament to the fragility of our species. Presented symbolically and through the lens of a reductionist ideology, nature is our society's hand mirror, reflecting the conceptual limits we impose on the world around us. I explore these tensions indirectly by juxtaposing the human tendency to organize, to reduce, with the chaos - the excess - that exists in the natural world. Although my works exist through string, bone, fur, plastic and canvas, they do not serve to represent nature. The elements found in art, which lie just beyond our scope of representation and control, the materials that can betray their origins through re-contextualization are nature.
Nature here is often a metaphor, at times a simulacrum, and increasingly a non-linear set of relations between entities. Through adopting some of the classical modus operandi's of how we come to know things through simplification and rigid categorization, I aim to destabilize the methodology used to order these objects. Simple geometric forms - the canvas, the square, the grid - are used to highlight the futility of these systems of knowledge. %Truth% in this sense is always shifting; a universal truth, a perfected form, the square, the circle are ideas that, through the act of purification, cut off the wayward branches which, ironically, made them beautiful in the first place.
My work is "fabricated wilderness", a garden, but its order bears little resemblance to logic. Its is obsessive, compulsive. I want to juxtapose this reductionist formality found in the Western scientific and cultural paradigm with excess through the construction of my pieces. This is achieved by employing natural and fabricated materials as a palette to contrast different systems of ordering. Some of these systems mask the original identity of the material, while others instead highlight its character. This explains why I choose to use the grid (and square) representationally and aesthetically as objects that are reduced, static, and idealized. Against this, the obsessive and consuming action of the string acts as a corrupted methodology, a system gone awry. It is at this point when the pieces begin to speak more clearly about our assembled and interconnected relationships with nature. They are residues, ruins of the human condition - imitating our desires to collect, assemble, fixate, obsess, fetishize, and worship.
At their chaotic apex, these works exude a corporeal presence. This bodily quality drives me to push the viewer ever closer to the artwork. The art is not only meant to be touched, but to be encountered. I'm interested in the negotiation between people as a character of language. Touch existing as the most intimate form of language and consequently the least biased. One cannot create a lens in which to filter out things one does not wish to encounter through touch; it does not discriminate. This is why the image is so important in these classical idealizations of perfection in nature, because only through the image can nature truly be tamed.
The reductionist and taxonomic systems of ordering keep this confronting (corporeal) experience of touch at bay, because it is the body that our culture fears most; it dies, ages, transmutes. It ebbs and flows with the energies of a world that we cannot simplify or contain.