SCOPE London Installation

This installation, originally conceived for a private bedroom, includes paintings, altered and decorated cast-resin polypore shelf fungus specimen models, and a quilt made for an earlier work, a full-size replica of a Shaker-style cherry canopy bed that has been altered with carved text and taxidermy eyes. It is presented here mediated by the implications of its context in a hotel room in London; a temporary home away from home located in one of the capitols of Western culture and commerce.

The painting, titled “Diorama of Common Indicator Species” is one out of a body of work that combines compositional and other formal elements and conventions from the ideologically related practices of store window display, natural history museum dioramas, product photography, and 17th century European paintings with their “embarrassment of riches” and their display of the spoils of colonial empire. Each animal symbolizes a moment in which nature embodies the substances of industrial society as each sports, as though by genetic modification, the chemical colors of consumerism, advertising billboards, food and pharmaceutical dyes, and product packaging.

The fungus specimens are cast from a collection of hundreds of fruiting bodies of the “Artist’s Fungus”, as the species is called, collected from the woods around my parents’ house in the New York suburbs and from my own home in rural Illinois.  Fungi, including rusts, smuts, puffballs, shelf fungi and mushrooms have long provided a semi-comic, poetic metaphor for me. This metaphor has two simultaneous, yet somewhat contradictory, references in my work. The plants themselves function in an ecosystem to break down dead organic matter, destroying old structures, recycling nutrients and making them available for new plant growth.  The fruiting bodies of the shelf fungus are evidence of rot within whatever structure they appear on. In American and English cultural traditions, fungi are disdained; they are associated with death, madness, coprophagy, and witchcraft—the process of decay is to be feared. Here, they provide a metaphor for revolutionary change, even as they declare evidence of rot within. The presence of the fungus sculptures on institutional walls, in institutional colors, suggests a specific content, as does their resemblance to the decorative bunting used in U.S. political campaigns.

The quilt and the Mad Bunny sheets transform a bed, a place of safety, intimacy and privacy, into a platform for a sleep disturbed by semi-comic but insistent little monstrosities that even home fashions and cushy materials can’t keep entirely at bay. The sleeper rests amid repeated images of nature, in the form of the bunny, gone a little monstrous, as he is literally blanketed with industrial signage used to indicate hazards such as radiation, explosivity, flammability, and biohazard. The quilt is based on a common Victorian design called “Around the World”. Patterned after the excessive decorating practices seen in high-end shelter magazines and home design stores, these parodies of home fashions suggest that our domestic arrangements cannot exclude what is outside the door.