Roxy Paine
Roxy Paine (born 1966, New York City)[1] is an American painter and sculptor widely known for his installations that often convey elements of conflict between the natural world and the artificial plains man creates.
[2] Since 1990, Paine's works have been exhibited in major collections and galleries across the United States, Germany, Sweden, England, the Netherlands, and Israel.
Throughout his childhood, he spent his free time exploring the wooded, overgrown areas of land that separated housing developments in his neighborhood.
His highly detailed simulations of natural phenomena include an ambitious series of hand-wrought stainless steel trees, vitrines of mushroom and plant life in various states of decay and several large-scale machines designed to replicate creative processes.
"[5] Paine began showing his work in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1990 and 1991 at an artist run collective called Brand Name Damages (which he helped to found) and he had his first solo exhibition at the short-lived Herron Test-Site in October 1992.
His early work consisted of kinetic and time-based sculptures such as Viscous Pult, 1990, which consisted of a paint brush smearing ketchup, white paint and motor oil on the gallery space's front window; and Displaced Sink, 1992, which had a leaking pipe in the ceiling dripping water on a tall stack of soap bars, leaving a pool of semi-liquid soap to collect on the gallery floor.
[6] His next solo exhibition was at Ronald Feldman Gallery in 1995, and it included other kinetic works, but the central and most critically acclaimed work was a piece called Dinner of the Dictators, 1993–95, a vitrine enclosing the taxidermied favorite meals of infamous dictators, ranging from Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler to Napoleon Bonaparte and Suharto.
Bridging the gap between the naturalistic and mechanized works, Paine also creates large-scale stainless steel trees and boulders of varying sizes (ranging from 8 – 50 feet in height).
Paine's vitrines and botanical works often feature replicas of plants that have been discovered as extremely poisonous or have been used by humans for experimental hallucinogenic or drug experiences.
Another example is the leafy plant genus Datura, which has long been used as a poison and hallucinogen; many species are known by common names such as Hell's Bells or Devil's weed.
Removing the artist's hand in the creative process and replacing it with a computer program is the crux of Paine's machine-based works.
Most recently, Paine introduced his Erosion Machine, 2005, which consists of a robotic arm that traces and cuts patterns into large blocks of stone.
About the SCUMAK (Auto Sculpture Maker), art historian Jonathan Fineburg wrote that "The beauty of the machine and the eccentricity of the results are also a paean to the romantic.
Paine positions both his gardens and his machines at a fluid interface of man, nature, and science; they take the viewer to an intuitive experience of the liminal place at which scientists have arrived as they begin to redesign the human genome and connect living neurons with silicon chips.
[11] Employing the language that he has invented pertaining to each of these fictive species, Paine's trees are "grown" through a laborious process of welding together the cylindrical piping and rods of diminishing size.
It still uses arboreal forms, but they now mesh with other overtly defined branching systems: a vascular network of arteries and veins with two plump kidneys, mushroom colonies and their germinating mycelia, neuron bundles and taxonomic diagrams, and raw pipelines connected to steel tanks and industrial valves.
Taking more than three years to produce, this 56-foot-tall stainless steel dendroid sculpture, as described by Paine, "was trying to capture a churning, swirling force."
In June 2014, Symbiosis (2011) was installed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in Iroquois Park, originally on temporary loan to the Association for Public Art courtesy of Paine and Marianne Boesky Gallery.
In 2015, the Association for Public Art received a grant from the Daniel W. Dietrich II Trust, Inc. to acquire Symbiosis, enabling the dendroid to remain in Philadelphia.
I think it is particularly pertinent at this moment when the amount of information is so vast, and access to it so instantaneous; yet the kinds of questions being asked feel throttled and narrow, a retreat into the comforts of each person's hyper-specialized realm of knowledge.
