A form of this statement was first published on the occasion of the exhibition and catalog 'Biomimicry' at the Herron Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana.
The work exists simultaneously as a model and the thing itself.
I don’t want to make distinctions or value judgments between what’s “real” and “artificial” or what’s “mimicry” and what’s “invention.” How these ideas converge into meta-realities, swallowing elements non-categorically just seems more interesting.
The pejorative connotations of “fake” and the currency placed in the “real” serve to illustrate how this antiquated summarization perpetuates reductive forms of thinking.
I’m trying to understand some things. The work helps in this process by providing a tool to speculate with.
There could be two ways of approaching the idea of mimicry. One is to make something look like something else. The other is to make the thing that you believe, or the thing that you really want. This seems infinitely more interesting and way more dangerous.
The sculptures are like small theaters situated somewhere between reality/fantasy, logical necessity/absurdity, speculation/certainty, work/play and science/serendipity. These flexible areas are where materials and events become re-enchanted, mystical.
Sometimes the work wants to be everything, forgetting that this is clearly impossible.
March 2004
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