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"The clock gave us increments, and saved us from eternity." Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization "They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all the aspects of the universe to some one of them." Jorge Luis Borges, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius Much of my work of the past fifteen years has explored the idea that the elaborate systems we have devised to outwit chaos are the same ones whose inane maintenance now occupies our every waking moment. I imagine most of my projects as having been put forth by an unidentified administrative authority intent on replacing ungainly representatives of “the natural world” with hyper-efficient surrogates. I have drawn inspiration from the work of the 18th century Utopian visionary architect, Etienne-Louis Boullée (whose proposals were too ambitious ever to be built), by the Scientific Management movement with its reckless celebration of efficiency, and by the history of Wunderkammern (“cabinets of curiosity”) and museum display. The notion of “style” has played an important role in this work in terms of material choices, proportions, and levels of elegance or fussiness that pay intentionally vague tribute to the prevailing aesthetics of prior centuries or decades. I am increasingly fascinated by the inextricability of style from manufactured things; it is an immediate by-product of any combination of material and connective system. In my recent work I have attempted to comment on the relationships, or lack thereof, between man-made systems and the phenomena they purport to represent or explain: systems such as scientific nomenclature and linear perspective. I have come to see representation as inseparable from stylization, insofar as one must always choose or invent a system or order by which to interpret perceived things, a tolerance, a level of magnification or reduction, and a substance or module from which to produce the new entity or “image”. Anything short of actually re-growing a thing from the same kind of cells of which the “original” is formed, would seem to me to be stylizing. I work primarily in sculpture (both mechanical and static), video, and drawing (using Adobe Illustrator, a vector drawing program.) |