November 2004
The juxtaposition has been central to my visual language and the content that I explore. Contrasts and comparisons between animal/machine; nature/industrialism; indigenous/modern nation states; local economies/globalization have often been reoccurring themes. By pairing together opposites, the viewer is left to come to their own conclusion and to consider the reasons, circumstances and future possibilities of the two different entities - both alone and when they merge. The visual statement is to ask questions rather than provide concrete answers. Working in a multitude of different artistic mediums, from collage to writing to sound - the juxtaposition has been utilized to explore a number of topics. The first visual series to incorporate this idea was machine-animal collages, a black and white collage series that fused together machine and animal parts. The series began in 1995 and consists of photocopies of two separate images that when fused together form a hybrid creature. The series speaks of an uneasy future of genetic engineering; robotics, nanotechnology and science run amok where industrialization, scientific tampering and a lack of democratic decision making bring upon the alteration/extinction of the animal world. The series addresses the larger question of how one measure’s the concept of progress. Is it through the invention of new technologies that assert our dominance over nature or can progress be measured by living in balance with the environment and creating minimal disruption of the cycles of nature? The series also questions how inventions are introduced to the world. What is the democratic decision-making process involved in technology and how large of role does the public have in deciding upon which inventions become widespread. For instance, what would have been the fate of nuclear weapons had the public first been allowed to give input whether or not this technology should have been developed or not? Will citizens have an input as new technologies, especially genetic engineering, become more prevalent? Aesthetically, the machine-animal collage series embraces the low resolution and the deteriorated quality of a Xerox copy. The photocopied images and the cut and paste methods working by hand produces images that become difficult to date. The images could be seen as a relic from the past, a lost scientific manual, or a Dada-like, Max Ernst-like collage image. Or the images could be seen as a contemporary work, a manual for a design for the future.
• Where does the food we consume come from? How does an understanding or lack of understanding of the process of food production, particularly meat, impact our individual decisions in what we decide to consume? • What are the larger implications of being connected/disconnected with our food source? • Is consumerism a passive or participatory activity? • Why are the people in the images disengaged, nonchalant by the massive piles of meat? • What is the role of the monument? Are these images monuments to meat? • What are the politics, power dynamics of eating animals? |