Missteps

Sculpture can equal truth in a time when experience mediated by electronic circuitry has become standard. In this culture first hand experience is shifting to a secondary mode, while mediated experience through electronic interfaces has become increasingly prevalent. In my sculptural practice I wish to perform this shift, not through simply referencing the actual/virtual, but by generating work that understands and functions within multiple perceptive environments. To do this, metaphors from virtual space or the hyper-real are incorporated into dimensional works. Simply, images transmute into objects that deny gravity, elude surface, combine freely and behave in ways that are understood within the virtual but are unfamiliar to physical space. These distortions, in part, are a way of generating a grammar or visual framework that does not preference one space over another but exposes their simultaneity as a new reality.

I saw participation in Blackbird, a publication that exists digitally, as an opportunity to invert my sculptural practice, applying logic embedded in the physical world to digital content. Missteps is a curatorial project in which found digital imagery has been organized through the lens of Darwin’s theory of evolution and Dawkin’s theory of memetics. Specifically, found proliferative images (digital memes), are arranged as though they have evolved visually. The project begins with two bookends, an image of isopods, creatures whose fossil record dates back 300 million years, and an image of Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist who introduced the concept of memes. These images were then connected through a kind of visual tracing back, in which visually similar found images act as stand-ins for the logical evolutionary steps that would otherwise connect Dawkins with 300 million year old forms of life.

To view the project, scroll down.