Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Machine, Man vs. Pandora: Age-old Conflicts Dealt With Here: -

2 years ago

Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Machine, Man vs. Pandora: Age-old Conflicts Dealt With Here:

A while back, I posted on Roxy Paine— a sculptor whose work seems to blur the man-made and natural worlds into one strange hybrid. His installation on the rooftop of the Met this past summer was an abstraction of fallen branches created with stainless steel industrial piping— an “abstraction” which provokes us to consider the relationships between man, nature, and machine. He presents objects of nature as “abstract”, shiny, industrial, so we can’t help but notice the irony: the industrial machine, responsible for so much of our environment’s destruction, now recreates it. While his stainless steel branches remind us of a lightning storm, or those static-electricity globes they used to sell at Radio Shack, the works below— his SCUMAKS— vaguely recall the glowing vegetation on Pandora. They are created with an Auto Sculpture Maker (yes, a machine) which spits out the plastic blobs onto a conveyor belt. Each unique creation retains a certain personality to the effect that it wouldn’t seem inappropriate to give them each a Power Ranger name. ”Zach”, “Billy”, and “Kimberly” (below) were included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and are three examples of the heavily-collected SCUMAKS. No 3D glasses required.