ABSURD NATURALISM:
FIELD BIOLOGY ON THE CRUST OF THE EARTH
By
Allison (Sunny) Karow
BFA, BS, Arizona State University, 2006
A THESIS ESSAY SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF APPLIED ARTS

in
Visual Arts
EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN

2013
© Allison Karow 2013

Table of Contents
Table of Contents………………………………..………………………………………ii
Abstract……………………………………………...…………………………………..iii
List of Images………………………………………..…………………………………..v
Acknowledgments…………………………………..………………………………….vii
Introduction – Biosphere Three……......………………………………….…..1
Installation 1 – Lithosphere……………………………..........………………..7
Installation 2 – Stones Shaped By Chance………………………...……….22
Installation 3 – Chelonioidea………..……...……………………………...…34
Conclusion – A Cleansing Storm..…………………………………………...46
Appendix A –Annotated Bibliography: Assisted Reproductive Technology…....50
Works Cited………………………………………………………...…………………..55

ii

Abstract

This project examines the growth and accumulation of collectio ns, and the
political implications of categorization in three installations: Lithosphere, Stones
Shaped by Chance, and Chelonioidea. These installations invent worlds in a
parallel universe; with their own biologies and genetics. They are influenced by
scientific initiatives such as The Human Genome Project and Biosphere 2, which
provide a conceptual framework for artworks that examine systems for life cycles
and analysis. Using taxonomy, horror vacui, encyclopedias, and cabinets of
curiosities as references, I accumulate my own collections with an awareness of
the idiosyncrasies inherent to any collection. I use the term Absurd Naturalism to
describe the impossibility of maintaining a neutral and omniscient standpoint as
the creator of a collection. In this way, it also describes the field I am working in –
problems and solutions circle one another until they are indistinguishable, and
the work comes out of the center of this spiral.
My installations take form by interpreting ecological systems, using
handmade, crafted, and found materials. Repetition, mutation, and reproduction
are central in both the content and the methodology. Drawing is the source of all
mutations. Here, the aesthetics of DIY, childhood craft, queer spaces, and
underground punk are used to question the authority of information and the
meaning of scientific facts. While artists such as Albertus Seba and Luigi Serafini
provide a conceptual basis for my work, collectives such as Paper Rad and
Wham City serve as both my contemporaries, and my audience. Growth and

iii

categorization oscillate between the personal and the political in this project. The
research questions move under my own skin and back into the studio. I am
interested in genetics as the basis for familial relation and sameness, genetic
mutation as a marker for change, and how genetics functions in redefining the
category of biological life.

iv

List of Images
Image 1.0 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Biosphere Two , digital image, 2013
Image 1.1 – Allison (Sunny) Karow , The Eaters, sketch from the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at
UBC, 2012

Image 2.0 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Lithosphere, artist’s book: cover, installation view, color page
#2, 2012
Image 2.1 – Colin Chillag, I’m An Evolutionary Biologist and An Erroneous Model (detail),
paintings, 2008
Image 2.2 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Grazers, Autotrophs, Predators, Parasites, Decomposers ,
drawing, 2011
Image 2.3 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Eaters, drawing, 2011
Image 2.4 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Impossible Shapes, Building Blocks, detail from The Last
Summer, drawing, 2011
Image 2.5 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, The Last Summer , detail, drawing, 2011
Image 2.6 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Cone Worms with detail, assemblage, 2012
Image 2.7 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, In Petrified Forest After Cleansing St orm, collage, 2012
Image 2.8 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, The Last Summer , drawing, 2011
Image 2.9 – Luigi Serafini, pages

and

from Codex Seraphinianus , 1976

Image 3.0 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Shape #1 – Waterfall , installation, 2012
Image 3.1 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Shape #1 – Waterfall, details, installation, 2012
Image 3.2 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Shape #2 – Shrine, installation, 2012
Image 3.3 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Shape #2 – Shrine, details (text on the right reads “trying to
measure a certain distance / in an imaginary dome”), installation, 2012
Image 3.4 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Necker cube and blivet (top), impossible shape #1(bottom),
drawing, 2013
Image 3.5 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Shape #3 – Leaky Horseshoe, installation, 2012

v

Image 3.6 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Shape #3 – Leaky Horseshoe, details, installation, 2012
Image 3.7 – Albertus Seba, Stones Shaped by Chance , pg. 399 of Cabinet of Natural Curiosities
Image 3.8 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Cone Worms in progress, sculptural elements, 2011
Image 3.9 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Glow Worms in progress, sculptural elements, 2012
Image 3.10 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Shape #4 – Bend, installation, 2012
Image 3.11 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Shape #4 – Bend, details, installation, 2012
Image 4.0 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Chelonioidea, animation stills, 2012
Image 4.1 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, E-mail Correspondence, 2012
Image 4.2 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Worms in progress, sculptural elements, 2012
Image 4.2 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Mutant Hybrids Reprodu cing, installation, 2012
Image 4.3 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Tree Fall , sculpture, 2012
Image 4.4 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Assemblage #1 , with detail, assemblage, 2012
Image 4.5 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Cone Ring Worm #2 , with detail, sculpture, 2012
Image 4.6 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Uninstalling Tree Fall, 2012
Image 4.7 – Allison (Sunny) Karow, Fast Like A Dart / In the Petrified Forest After A Cleansing
Storm, with detail, installation, 2012

Image 5.00 – Final Installation and Final Exhibition, 2013
Image 5.0 – Derek Woodward, Cashtub, digital image, 2012
Image 5.1 – Derek Woodward, Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, digital image, 2012

vi

Acknowledgments

All of my gratitude to the friends, family, colleagues, and mentors who have
supported me along the way. Special thanks to my supervisor, Ingrid Koenig, and
my colleague and friend, Felicia E. Gail. And most importantly to Daniel Martin,
whose loving partnership on all fronts got us to all the imaginary places I never
knew were real.

vii

Dedicated to Amalia Wilson and Crissy Corwin

Introduction – Biosphere Three

Biosphere Two is an architectural / scientific / new age project housed in a
giant glass temple in Arizona’s Sonoran desert, north of Tucson. It is sealed off
from the world (‘Biosphere One’), by a stainless steel plate on the bottom and a
framework of glass and steel that reaches up into the surrounding desert.
Approaching the structure is a surreal moment; inside, beads of water drip
against a pane, lush plants push up against the glass, and look out at the thirsty
desert completely separated from it. Walking through the structures on a scripted
guided tour takes you through five biomes.1 These manufactured environments
are big enough to experience as a facsimile of the natural, but small enough to
study as closed systems.
This science experiment is made up of rainforest, ocean, savannah,
plants, animals, and people. It is a failed utopia that is now a tourist attraction
and a research facility. The project managers collected examples of major types
of biological life – a scientific version of Noah’s Ark. They used this to create a
mini-earth, which might reveal something about ecological relationships and
human survival. Their most famous experiment was sealing a team of people
inside for two years to observe whether life as we understand it could be
sustained in a sealed environment. This experiment failed, but the space is now
used to conduct different kinds of research.

1

a large, naturally occurring community of flora and fauna occupying a major habitat, e.g. forest
or tundra (Oxford Dictionary.)

1

Walking through B2 is anti-climatic at best, from a scientific point of
view. The project is a delightfully absurd money pit, with cracked
windowpanes safeguarding the perimeter and questionably
functional airlocks that prevent contamination from the outside
world. I pulled a candy bar out of my pocket in a basement tunnel
where cockroaches lined concrete tanks, labeled obscurely.
Nobody noticed or maybe it didn’t matter. I suspended my disbelief
and pretended I was trapped in Jurassic Park. I ate my candy bar
and spilled crumbs everywhere. I ignored the tour guide and made
a sound recording of the echoes inside the “West Lung” while an
explanation of air regulation droned on in the background. I was in
another place, a location more historical than spatial – a cave or a
tunnel as a site for introspection2.

Image 1.0 – Biosphere Two , digital image, 2013
2

The experience of enclosed domes is an example of being in a space that is emotionally and
spiritually charged. Like the corners and nests in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, the
domes and tunnels of Biosphere 2, and the spaces created in the installations in t his thesis, are
carefully structured to create an atmosphere for inquiry and close inspection / introspection.

2

Biosphere Two was created as a 3D encyclopedia, a catalogue of all life
on earth. This flawed project failed by attempting to create a facsimile of life on
earth based on appearance alone. For example, insects from different bioregions
were combined to create the ‘rainforest,’ fog and rain were created artificially,
and distances between biomes were vastly scaled down. I use this model, a
combination of utopic pseudoscience and encyclopedic collecting, as a starting
point for my own project.
Biosphere Three is a label I use to envision the universe that I create via
sculpture and installation. It is outside / inside Biosphere One, and more cynical /
playful than Biosphere Two. Creatures morph and blend and grow, not in a
replication of what we are used to, but rather in a parallel universe. Like a
filmmaker, I ask viewers to enter a prepared space and suspend disbelief.
Instead
Cr
of a plot I present a set where systems and mechanisms embody growth.
eatures pass by one another in this space – humans, insects, birds,
more humans. Creating and destroying hierarchies in a constantly changing, but
closely monitored environment. The creatures in my project are sometimes part
of the installation, sometimes the people who experience it. Lines and string
guide eyes around a space but don’t point to an exit, or answer to how things are
connected.
“No mapping is possible when a party is moving at fast speed such as when
pursued or pursuing. Light might be avail able to make or read a map. Infravision
is not suitable in such circumstances. Marks, dropped objects, or a trailing string

3

or line are typically useless devices in dungeons, as they will be obliterated
moved or destroyed by passing creatures. 3”

This t hesis project is a series of three installations that grew out of
drawings. The process is a part of the installation, and is visibly expressed as an
obsessive collection. My studio turns inside-out to expose the discoveries that
grow out of book forms; drawings that leak onto the floor and reach for one
another; shoots of mold made of string, sporing along an electrical cord to find a
substrate that is the same hue or shape or type. Piles combine and separate,
mirroring the overlapping aesthetics of field guides, encyclopedias, and other
collections that I curate.
The categorizing of life and nature guide my process, but are not always
visible. The pile, the spillage, a dense mat of urban forest creeps through the
gallery and leaks out of what were once paintings and drawings – these forms
define the aesthetic of a universe “whose center is everywhere and whose
circumference is nowhere.”4 Dense, brightly colored assemblages blur the rigid
boundaries between plant, animal, mineral, and other categories. The work
alternately takes the form of small, separate biomes (i.e. drawings, sculptures,
books) and larger unified landscapes (installations).

3

From E. Gary Gygax’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook.
From Borges’ The Aleph, a story about a single point that contains the en tire universe. The
Aleph can only be viewed while meditating in the dark, underneath one of the character’s
basement stairs.
4

4

This project is a self -organizing system 5, a cabinet of curiosity, a shrine,
and an encyclopedia.

Image 1.1– The Eaters, sketch from the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at UBC, 2012
5

I am referring to Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s term autopoiesis
here.Autopoiesis describes a sys tem that can replicate itself, specifically the biological cell. I
appropriate this term in my studio to approximate the idea of a system in which all the parts work
together as an active machine.

5

The research here comes from my interest in the biological project of
collecting, categorizing, and describing everything. This manifests in concepts
like taxonomy and horror vacui.
It also translates to a political scale through the institution of science. The
political practice of categorizing into sets and subsets is at stake in these
projects. Legislation and hierarchical organization within society are the
consequences of assigning traits based on category. I use the separation of
things into the categories of life and non-life as an example of how this works,
and explore it from many angles throughout this thesis.
"[C]ategories express not only the forms but also the conditions of exis tence. Just
as one does not judge a man’s value according to the conception he has of
himself, one cannot judge - or admire - this specific society by taking the
discourse it addresses to itself as necessarily true.” 6

6

From Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.

6

Installation 1 – Lithosphere

Image 2.0 – Lithosphere, artist’s book: cover, installation view, color page #2, 2012

“each day that passes / you become less of a person / and more of an idea / or a

set of ideas / like a book”7

Lithosphere is an installation and a body of work that includes an artist’s
book, drawings, animation, and sculpture. The installation brings together many
works, which focus on Absurd Naturalism and are the building blocks from which
the rest of my thesis work grows. I use the word lithosphere, literally “crust of the
earth,” to refer to the project of naming the collection – the accumulation of the
things on earth, or the part that humans are primarily concerned with. The crust
is where we are, and where all of our primary concerns live. It is the most
important thing for us, but it is also absurdly insignificant – an orange peel
compared to the rest of space.
8

I appropriate Michel Foucault’s term, heterotopia , to convey a sense of
the neutrality towards embracing a future that is neither utopian nor dystopian –

7

From My Most Favorite Book, by Richie Gimbel. From the dedication page of the artist’s book,
Lithosphere.

7

an other place. The first time I heard this word, I thought it meant something else
– an alternative to utopia or dystopia, a way of thinking about the future without
attaching a value to it. Here, I mutate the word heterotopia to mean an other
place, in the sense that it can offer a variety of alternative ways to think about
both theoretical and actual places. Juxtaposed with Foucault’s other space, my
heterotopia becomes an experimental playground, where a drawing creates
growth unmediated by the constraints of the physical world. As I reassign the
meaning of heterotopia, I am also twisting the ideas of ecology, biosphere,
lithosphere, and scientific exploration in my research so that they can be
experienced as other spaces.

Image 2.1 – Colin Chillag, I’m An Evolutionary Biologist and An Erroneous Model (detail), 2008

8

9

A term coined by Michel Foucault for a speech delivered at an architectural conference in 1967
to describe the conceptual separation of certain spaces from t he rest of society, specifically those
used for activities outside of daily life (honeymoons, cemeteries, boarding schools, etc.)
9
Colin Chillag is an artist who uses the form of biological documentation to play with the creation
of facts and systems. Evo lutionary biologists also use the idea of a “book of life” in the form of a
“tree of life”, in order to show networks of relatedness amongst organisms. Expanding beyond
this, Manuel Lima visualizes and theorizes the complex networks, in his book Visualizing
Complexity, that unite data across fields, resulting in maps that pose alternative to the “tree of life”
model.

8

Efforts to create a “book of life” are ubiquitous in Western culture. For
example, the encyclopedia attempts to catalog “everything” from an objective
outside perspective and The Human Genome Project10 is perceived as an
encyclopedia for life itself. Such collections of information are constructed with a
bias towards the author, and point to a tradition that is used to conduct formal
scientific research. Instead, I work within a system that recognizes the researcher
as part of the research. As a studio artist, I don’t know what I’m doing in advance
of doing it, but I know that I start from the framework of a field that must
recognize the artist as part of the artwork. This results in a type of field biology,
which I call Absurd Naturalism11 .
Absurd Naturalism is a semi -permeable, overlapping gray area of art and
science, with central principles of exploration, imagination, collecting and
organizing. This takes elements from the scientific method, (question, research,
hypothesize, experiment, analyze results, report results, ask a new question) and
adds the freedom to break any of the rules, to use humor, and to be playful with
the meaning of information and the authority of the fact.

10

The Human Genome Project was initiated in 1990 and completed in 2003. Its main goal was to
identify all of the genes that make up human DNA , and to store this information in databases for
future use in both the public and private sectors. In her book, The Poetics of DNA, Judith Roof
reveals the circular nature of culture and science in which cultural biases are revealed in scientific
facts. This allows for a pop science atmosphere in which the metaphor of genes as words, DNA
as sentences, and the genome as a book conjures images of tiny protagonists functioning within
hierarchies inside our bodies. This leads to a pseudoscience that reinforces the notion that a
person’s identity is housed in their genes.
11
My understanding of the absurd is as a philosophy in which meaning in life cannot be
ascertained or derived from a rational search, but that the struggle itself to search for types of
meaning is revealing of deep truths. I use this, and the direct link between Dada and Theatre of
the Absurd, to situate myself politically. Martin Esslin, critic and author of The Theatre of the
Absurd, describes how this type of theater expresses the absurd as a disharmony between
people and their purpose in content, and also in form. The stylistic form of the plays and writing
embodies a kind of discord that makes a serious joke of embracing futility and reinforces
irrationality by being irrational.

9

Absurd Naturalism is a pseudoscience, and is the theoretical precursor to
Absurd Evolution – a methodology that implies that mistakes in drawing are
similar to mutations in DNA copying. Absurd Evolution is the part of my
methodology that describes how I use drawing as a tool. As a drawing is
repeated, changes and accidents occur as I translate the original subject into the
first drawing. The spaces between the drawing and the subject, and the moments
where mutations occur, become the starting points for the next set of drawings.
Then, a second kind of mutation occurs as subsequent drawings are made from
the original one. Using this process I build a typology specific to my work, like
characters in the story of an encyclopedia. For example, the Eaters (below) are
characters that metabolize other life forms as they move through a landscape.
They are part of a lineage that evolved over hundreds of drawings.

Image 2.2 – Grazers, Autotrophs, Predators, Parasites, Decomposers , 2011

Image 2.3 – Eaters, 2011

10

Image 2.4 – Impossible Shapes, Building Blocks, detail from The Last Summer , 2011

Image 2.5 – The Last Summer , detail, 2011

11

I use low -tech and recently obsolete materials, for example office
supplies.12 The photocopier is a special example, because it mutates the image
with each duplicate, opening up an opportunity for transformation. I compare the
photocopier to organic systems of proteins copying DNA. Both are visualized as
machines that replicate with a certain amount of precision and accuracy. Built
machines approximate life, but the line between the two is not always clear. How
does this approximation through scientific technology function differently? How
can the mechanical inaccuracy that creates glitches be compared to the
biological inaccuracy that leads to mutation? This question addresses a facet of
reproduction in art and biology that I continue to research.

Image 2.6 – Cone Worms with detail, 2012
12

My materials are from the Anthropocene, the geological era since humans have inhabited the
Lithosphere. This latest layer, or crust, of the earth, is populated by things that exist in a variety of
relationships with humans.

12

Throughout this project, the book is used as a metaphor to reference a
complete collection, and to represent the way we perceive DNA as the collected
genetic material of life. My work utilizes books ranging from visual dictionaries
and encyclopedias, to zines and artist’s books. This reflects on the gathering,
organization, and absorption of knowledge.
Every encyclopedia has evidence of its maker – they are conceptually
circular. The history of encyclopedias starts more than 1400 years before the
printing press. Texts could be alphabetical or topical, but not both. For example,
Chinese, Arabic, and Egyptian encyclopedias were arranged topically, not
alphabetically13. Before the Internet, the linear format of the book dictated the
way we could visualize categories and the connections between them using text.
Cabinets of curiosity are a three dimensional, environmental (installation) version
of this concept, wherein categories are often displayed topically.
Cabinets of curiosities are an historical marker in my research - during the
Age of Exploration there was no hierarchy between natural, fabricated, and
14

modified objects . They were housed in rooms or pieces of furniture that acted,
historically, as pre-cursors to the public museum in the 18th century and the
herbarium (plant archive). Cabinets of curiosities were collections of exotic
objects, which were combined without regard for hierarchical categories.

13

from pg 57 of James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood.
In Europe during the Renaissance cabinets of curiosity functioned like encyclopedias –
collectors would showcase objects together in a room to show examples of common and exotic
objects alike. They represented a microcosm of the world. I look to Mark Dion’s methodology, in
which he unpacks the aesthetic of the cabinet of curiosities by showing the entire process that
leads to them. Unlike Mark Dion, who literally re -presents the inside of a museum and/or
university as a cabinet of curiosities, I use the aesthetic of the cabinet to show the absurdity of the
collection, but I show remnants of the process on the same plane instead of in a linear
progression. (Refer to Cabinet of Curiosities: Mark Dion and the Universi ty as Installation.)
14

13

Historian Lorraine Daston also uses cabinets of curiosities in this way to
discuss a return in the current history of science to having “more emphasis on
novelty and discontinuity,” rather than on a single grand narrative or a few
overarching paradigms15. The taxonomic boundaries imposed on objects today
appear rigid but they each have a history that can be taken apart and re-zoned,
changing the boundaries of what counts as a novelty or curiosity. For example,
over-sized physical models of biological samples were once necessary to
imagine what we can see now with computer imaging. These models,
repurposed through sculptures, transcend the boundaries from science object, to
useless object, to art object. This work critiques the separation of art and science
by playing with elements from both fields.
Similarly, I critique the binary of natural vs. fabricated by integrating the
two to create hybrids that question the definition of natural. In order to reposition
how we think of nature, philosopher Timothy Morton makes an investigation into
the definitions of nature, environment, ecology, and ambience. His theory of dark
ecology is a vantage from which to embrace the lack of a theoretical neutral
ground and make it impossible to get “outside” of nature. Dark ecology, as a
response to deep ecology and eco-critical writing, theorizes that discussing

15

From the podcast How to Think about Science, featuring David Cayley and Lorraine Daston in
th
conversation. They discuss the history of objectivity from the 18 c. to the present, including the
th
shifts in how the perception of curiosity in science changed from the 12 century onward. Novelty,
th
th
in this context, refers to flood of new objects brought to Europeans in the 16 and 17 centuries
due to exploration of the Far East and the West, and the subsequent “overwhelming experience
of the world suddenly crowded with new things,” as well as the shifts in perception towards
wonder, curiosity, and awe, as positive traits. The historical scope of my project ranges between
th
the early collecting efforts of 18 century and the ongoing consequen ces of the completion of the
st
Human Genome Project at the turn of the 21 century.

14

ecology in the first place requires a view of nature as “other.” This is what I intend
to capture when I call my encyclopedias examples of “Absurd Naturalism.”

During my time at ECUAD I lost my friend Richie and my
grandfather in the same month. I was reading a lot at the time, and
words had started to confuse me. My grandpa was dying, and my
friend was already gone. I went to talk with him for what I knew
would be the last time. He told me he would wake up and not
remember anything about his life. He would have to learn all the
words over again by listening to clues from other people – his
children or his caretaker. The caretaker, Richie, shared the same
name as my friend. He had tattooed a drawing of an angel on his
arm to remind him of my grandpa. I couldn’t look straight at him so I
stared at the drawing on his arm. I thought about my genetic family
and my chosen family crossing over in new ways, sharing
information unconsciously.

My work pays homage to a previous generation of artists, who also gave
priority to a do-it-yourself / do-it-together, interdisciplinary methodology which
integrated with a communal lifestyle. Fluxus was an integral part of this
movement in the 1960s, using anti-commercial methods of production and low
cost materials to circumvent the mainstream market16. Now, collectives like
Paper Rad, Wham City, Ascetic House 17 and many others foster this work ethic

16

I am interested in Fluxus as a philosophical practice that unites like -minded people across
geography and blurs the boundaries between art and life. From Ken Friedman’s in troduction to
The Fluxus Reader.
17
Paper Rad is an American East Coast collective known for their use of bright colors, zines and
comics, video art, and an underground / lo -fi aesthetic. Wham City is a collective from Baltimore
that has produced performanc e art, experimental music and visual art. Ascetic House is a
collective in Phoenix that is still making art and music underground. I have varying degrees of

15

in similar environments. Today’s cultural underground is more integrated with the
art world through the interfaces of the university, global trade, and the Internet,
allowing for art centers to be smaller and more numerous18. This fosters a global
environment for artists, who can form collective living/working situations without
leaving their cities of origin. We communicate through both a network of local
artists and the Internet. This links venues in different cities.
For example, my house in Phoenix (YOBS) connected with houses/art
spaces in dozens of other cities, and shared ideas by hosting weekly events for
five years, featuring performers, artists, musicians, etc. It was a cultural desert,19
within a geographical one. Here, art groups and music labels merge together and
distribute/trade material (records, zines, etc.) to grow and share ideas. For me,
the collective is like the biome – regionally specific, with individuals cross
-pollinating across biomes. The details are different, but the systems are similar.
These places become dislodged from the drone of daily life and transport their
participants to other spaces.

affiliation/separation with the people in these collectives, and share my work with them when
possible.
18
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
19
The desert usually symbolizes a barren wasteland, but to me the desert is a lush, low -lying
space that can only be seen with a discerning eye. Radicals and weirdos have to band together in
the harsh reality of a huge conservative city and have a dedication to making art and supporting
each other that can’t be found in safer cities. The air is so polluted that we have some of the most
beautiful sunsets on earth.

16

Image 2.7 – In Petrified Forest After Cleansing Storm, 2012

The Last Summer , a work completed in my Fall 2011 te rm at ECUAD,
connects two main biomes, the desert and the forest, with groups of roaming
creatures in the middle. It is the biosphere (a landscape housing many biomes),
and the lithosphere (interactions on the earth’s crust.) This piece is a triptych
consisting of three panels on a substrate of thin craft paper, and is constructed
by collaging together drawings of creatures grafting each other, made with ink
and colored pencil. The collaged pieces are laminated to the paper with scotchtape. Used in a meticulous and time-consuming way, these inexpensive
materials point to a system where value is created without monetary expenditure.
Modular forms such as rectangular cubes and cylinders appear throughout the
piece, as well as more suggestive ones, such as traffic cones and fruit baskets.
17

These elements are repeated as segments or independent forms that translate
as plants, animals or combinations of the two.

Image 2.8 – The Last Summer , 2011

This is in part homage to Marcel Dzama’s The Last Winter, a piece he
made before leaving Winnipeg. This was the first large scale piece I made after
leaving Phoenix. I think of it as a personal farewell, and a first major example of
Absurd Naturalism. The following elements are integral to Dzama’s work and my
own: flattening of space; repetition of invented characters; distinct and unifying
color palette; use of playful imagery to draw in a viewer (closer inspection reveals
sinister elements); and the use of drawing, sketchbook, diorama, sculpture, and
film as installation elements.
My methods depart at the point where I am particularly interested in
something arbitrary and otherwise unencumbered with meaning, becoming
symbolic through repetition. I am also influenced by the movement of artists,
18

such as Dzama, towards outsider art “to articulate a marginal position in relation
to the increasingly codified systems of official representation.20” In other words,
consciousness of a marginalized position allows me to locate myself artistically
and politically. Tension between p rofessional and outsider artwork is present in
my work, and continues to develop via exploration of modes of distribution and
exposure.

Image 2.9 – Sketches – Kiwi, Shapes, Probably No, 2012

The work in Lithosphere was partially inspired by Luigi Serafini’s Codex
Seraphinianus – a thick encyclopedia as an artifact that catalogs the many
artifacts of an otherworldly place. It includes thorough sections on flora, fauna,
minerals, architecture, machines, the history of its own language, and cultural
customs. The entire book is annotated in an invented language and includes
essays, labels, charts and other indecipherable hand-drawn graphics.

20

From pg. 1 of James Patten’s essay Grotesque Marginalia.

19

Image 2.10 – pages

and

from Codex Seraphinianus , 1976

The Codex uses a number of elements crucial to my practice – taxonomy,
hand drawn invented creatures, a psychedelic edge via 1970s utopian
architecture, and a bright, high contrast color palette. Serafini uses taxonomy to
reveal something about the constructed nature of made things, and their
relationship / cross-breeding with one another. I focus on the taxonomies of
invented worlds in the Codex. I pay specific attention to imagination, content, and
the difference between an imagined world and the real world. The moments
where the two overlap are my starting points. The outcome is a series of
drawings that have familiar elements but that do not exist on earth; a plant with
leaves that look like ladders, or petals that look like the necks of geese. To us
they look like hybrids, but perhaps they evolved that way because of a different

20

set of statistical improbabilities – the same kind that resulted in biological life on
our world. What if a genetic mutation that eventually led to the wing of a bird,
happened on the DNA of a bean sprout instead? This research question is
scientific, but as an artist I also ask: what if airplanes looked like flying bean
sprouts? This work points to questions about the slippery definition of the natural,
as well as the contents of reality.

21

Installation 2 – Stones Shape d By Chance

I collect objects obsessively, because I don’t like any empty space in my
work or my studio. Multiplication, excess, and accumulation are a part of my
personality that inevitably is part of the work. As in the First Law of
Thermodynamics, matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Therefore, I
position myself not as a creator or maker, but rather as a re-arranger, or
bricoleur21. Decentering the artist in relationship to the art materials, I assume the
role of the re-arranger to acknowledge the artist’s actions being different but not
privileged to the agency of the objects involved.22
Horror vacui is an art historical term that relates to part of this process – it
translates to ‘fear of empty space,’ but which I embrace with a positive spin in my
work. It has been used to refer to the suffocating atmosphere of the Victorian
era23, but has also resurfaced in analyses of the art of the mentally unstable, and
in contemporary Outsider and lowbrow art24. I think of it in terms of mass culture
and excess.25 The stress I feel when I think about the volume objects take up; the
biomass of manufactured items, junk sitting in storage units, dusty piles at flea

21

I borrow this term from Claude Levi -Strauss, as he uses it in The Savage Mind. To speak of a
bricoleur combines them as both artist and scientist, and refers to the practice of collecting
objects based on affinity and availability and us ing them to problem solve. This is an important
aspect of my studio practice.
22
Nicolas Bourriaud’s re -mix influences this position by affirming the project of rearranging found
art and materials and still acknowledging the authorship of the artist. From pg. 36 of
Postproduction.
23
Horror vacui can be located throughout many cultures and time periods, such as the Medieval
era and ancient Greece, but I use it here to address the sheer amount of goods that are part of
the system of consumerism.
24
In physics, the term refers to the absence of nothingness and voids in the material universe.
25
For example, Julian Stallabrass in Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, pg. 122: “The mass
production of standardized cars, road signs and traffic cones encourages us to see each element
on the road as merely one of a type, composing a complex but somehow standard situation.”

22

markets; flotsam orbiting the planet; or trying to pick out a brand of toothpaste.
These are examples of phenomena that inspire the anxiety, which I can only
work out in my studio. It is my task to temporarily re-purpose some of these
items, and to play with the tension between low brow and high art by mixing
found objects with traditional art supplies.26 I re-use objects from my collections
until they are exhausted. Then I send them back into an alleyway or a thrift store,
where they will begin another part of their life cycle.

Image 3.0 – Shape #1 – Waterfall , 2012
26

Rather than pretending I can escape the culture of consumerism entirely, I apply the role of the
re-arranger to the process of acquiring and discar ding objects. In a patchwork process that is as
much about attraction to a shiny object as it is directly related to how recently I got a paycheck, I
collect things out of the trash, find them on the street, spend money on them in a store, ask
strangers to buy them for me online, or hoard boxes of things from friends who are moving.

23

Image 3.1 – Shape #1 – Waterfall, details, 2012

Moving through a jungle at a steady pace makes a deep groove in
my brain. Now it’s called post-traumatic but the same thing
happens when anything is that intense. Patterns of leaves and
enormous flying beetles and glowing bugs of every color will play
back over in my head for years. I will come to understand the way
that paths are carved in brain matter like termite trails in wood.
Thoughts leading down familiar paths, hacking selectively with a
machete, assigning value to objects in a web of memories. The
jungle as a memory palace, a place I will go later for safety and to
redirect events into manageable compartments. We process
objects through the actions we submit them to, that connect to
whatever is happening in our brains at the time. In this way, we
change them and they change us, we carry each other’s texture. I
stared at an enormous stick nestled perfectly in the crease of a teninch long leaf, and then made eye contact as it lifted onto its legs
and got ready to move on.

A new manufactured item, a natural object, and something I fabricated or
re-arranged in my studio, all have individual vitalities and qualities that give them
24

personality. Since objects are affected by their own ecologies and biomes, they
exist as more than the sum of their parts. A plastic fruit basket is more than a
cube and more than the color green. It is the history of the factory it was made in,
the mold that mirrors its shape, the fruit it carried, the hands that carried it, the
other foods it sat in a bag next to. New materialism, in the words of Jane Bennett,
is a way of imagining the system that incorporates all of these things into the
assessment of a system that decenters people and acknowledges the agency of
objects.27
This agency is implied by Animism, a belief in the spiritual lives of non
-humans. Animism is also a concern of Strauss’ bricoleur, who understands the
context of flora and fauna in terms of their complex relationship to one another.
This is based on his contact, as an anthropologist, with indigenous knowledge /
memory, and his understanding of mythical thought as a kind of bricolage. In this
application, bricolage is the method for combining – myth and science are the
things being combined.28 Philosopher Timothy Morton describes this idea of
understanding in terms of the life cycle of an environment: “[p]lace is indeed a
questioning, a ‘what happened here?’ Animism thus turns out to have a lot in
common with an ecology to come (Morton 180).
Since Animism is not a part of Western culture , it conflates (for me) with
other ideas that seem magical, but are in fact important in understanding

27

In Chapter 1 of Vibrant Matter , called the force of things , she discusses a found assemblage of
objects in the street and describes how they are all connected.
28
From page 17 of The Savage Mind , in which Strauss understands the way that people
taxonomize based on appearance and use value as a path to relatedness amongst species. In
his version of taxonomy, he arrives at similar results but without an understanding of the
mythological.

25

ecology. Animism and magic realism hold hands in this way. Magic realism
creates an environment where the magical and the real exist together in the
same plane. It is a way into Animism through art and literature, and then back
into the physical world. I use elements from this genre to blur the boundaries
between real and imagined worlds. A type of magic realism happens when new
materialism gives life to objects and they can be imagined as having an Animistic
presence. For example, insect mimicry looks magical, but is real, and also shows
agency in non-humans, with aesthetic results.
“Insect mimicry is thus tantalizingly described by Caillois as a ‘temptat ion by
space,’ an assimilation to the surrounding environment that results from a desire
for fusion between animate and inanimate. As with the human experience of dark
space, argues Caillois, the mimetic insect is decentered: it no longer feels itself to
be the origin of spatial co -ordinates, and its awareness of being an entity distinct
from its external surroundings begins to disintegrate.” 29

I represent this by locating similar shapes in disparate objects, matching colors
on unrelated subjects, or copying patterns onto surprising substrates.
This results in a specific type of grafting that is less about a mash -up of
parts, and more about a subtle exchange of qualities between objects and things
that are near each other. The hybrid is an important idea in science fiction,
because it represents technology and the human desire to have control. But I am
trying to imply a universe where actants influence each other whether or not
humans intervene. In my studio, I spend a lot of time listening to the things
around me to see what they want to exchange with each other.
29

From pg. 84 of Claire Bishop’s Installation Art: A Critical History.

26

Image 3.2 – Shape #2 – Shrine, 2012

Image 3.3 – Shape #2 – Shrine, details (text on the right reads “trying to measure a certain
distance / in an imaginary dome”)

Like hybrids, impossib le shapes offer another way to see magic realism in
drawing. These shapes can be imagined in the 2nd dimension (i.e. drawing) but
not constructed in the 3 rd dimension (i.e. sculpture.) The blivet (image 3.4) is an
example. The necker cube is a shape I use for its simplicity as a modular building
block. Although it is not an impossible shape, it is conceivable from multiple
points of view, of which only one can be possible in space. I perceive both as
hybrids between theoretical shapes and real objects.
27

Image 3.4 – Necker cube and blivet (top), impossible shape #1(bottom), 2013

Image 3.5 – Shape #3 – Leaky Horseshoe, 2012

28

Image 3.6 – Shape #3 – Leaky Horseshoe, details, 2012

Stones Shaped by Chance is named after a monograph30 in Albertus
Seba’s Cabinet of Natural Curiosities. It references the imaginative categorizing
of objects that were collected for personal reasons (wonder, curiosity, pride), and
fitted into a taxonomic framework. In Cabinet, Seba draws monographs based on
items in his own collection that seem to correspond to familiar categories:
snakes, birds, starfish, etc. It occasionally includes subjects that are not as
natural as the book’s title suggests. Drawings etched into the mother-of-pearl
plates of Nautilus and Stones shaped by chance are two examples.

30

In biology, a monograph refers to the documenting of all of the members of a group, such as
species within a family.

29

Image 3.7 – Stones Shaped by Chance , pg. 399 of Cabinet of Natural Curiosities

Items I collect combine with ones that are laboriously handmade to stress
production - a meditative, solitary assembly line. I imagine an assembly line in a
huge factory, making massive amounts of items with no commercial value, mixed
together with the sludge and run-off from the same process31. I have to do this
alone, because new ideas are born out of the mutations inherent to this personal

31

Image 3.8 – Nicole Andrijevic & Tanya Schultz, Three Minutes Happiness, 2009

30

process. Old drawings recycle into new ones as hybrids through mistakes and
mutation, based on massive repetition of modular forms to mimic genetic copying
and embody meaning. For example, tube shapes symbolize ambiguity in gender,
growth, and reproduction. Cone shapes reference direction, time and
segmentation.

Image 3.9 – Cone Worms in progress, 2011

Image 3.10 – Glow Worms in progress, 2012

31

Image 3.11 – Shape #4 – Bend, 2012

Image 3.12 – Shape #4 – Bend, details, 2012

32

Installation 3 – Chelonioidea

Image 4.0 – Chelonioidea, animation stills, 2012

I got down onto the ground. I wore my regular clothes, but they fit
differently because my ovaries were the size of oranges and not the
usual almond-size. In this moment, I wanted to embody the sea
turtle, creatures that return to their birthplace by the shore to lay
eggs and then leave again. I was at the clinic, walking distance
from the place where my mom was born - Manhattan, by the water.
I got down onto the ground. I moved my flippers across the
concrete and waited. Some joggers went by. There wasn’t a tennis
court there when my mom was a kid. The windows had all been
replaced with nicer windows.
A few months later the NYU medical center would be evacuated
when all of lower Manhattan flooded in a hurricane. The clinic
where my eggs were. Melty soup when the power went out, or
growing in a womb...I have no way of knowing. A story in the news
about a woman giving birth in the hospital, and how she had to get
carried down all the flights of stairs with a cell phone for a light. She
would make it out with her genetic legacy intact.

The tension between containing a collection and being contained by one is
at the core of my studio practice. This act of circular discovery is meaningful in
many ways. Here, the process of making and arranging is absurd - eventually
what the collection reveals is the collector. This is true whether the nature of the
33

collection is personal (as in consumption of purchased items), genetic material
and circumstance that makes a family (identity), found biological samples (as in
taxonomy), or terms and definitions (like encyclopedias). The collection is a
temporary structure that self-identifies as permanent, an unfinished portrait that
declares itself complete. My DNA is sometimes my book, and sometimes my
author.
My collections are a combination of taxonomy and bricolage, which
creates an absurd field biology that can be applied to objects or humans, and
their pseudo- or accepted-scientific genetic linkages to one another. My interest
is this meeting point between scientific and artistic taxonomy, and where the
potential overlap lies. Claude Levi-Strauss talks about bricolage from the
perspective of structural anthropology. He uses native plant taxonomy as an
example of how organizing visually, has a metaphorical and tangible purchase on
genetic relatedness. He also advocates for a simultaneity of acquiring
knowledge: “Both science and magic […] require the same sort of mental
operations and they differ not so much in kind as in the different types of
phenomena to which they are applied.”32 This structure is a kind of
anthropological bricolage, using both magical and scientific methods to arrive at
overlapping conclusions.

32

From The Savage Mind.

34

Image 4.1 – E-mail Correspondence, 2012

Bricolage is importa nt here, both in its physical manifestation, as well as in
theory. I collect pieces of available material, and use those as the conceptual and
physical parameters to create a visual work. This process influences work’s form,
which often sits within the framework of installation but also references Dada
collage, Robert Rauschenberg’s combines and Joseph Cornell’s assemblages 33
. The work also contains it’s own meta-bricolage in the form of run-off. I define run
-off as the typically discarded bits of drawing, collecting and other research. It is
obsessively included in the work to reflect the process. I believe run-off is an
important and central part of art and science, which is disregarded as being
“behind the scenes,” in paradigms that are focused on expected outcomes.
There cannot be room for social change in new areas of study without
33

These artists were also collectors and arrangers, hoarders of trash or bric -a-brac and often
outcasts.

35

models for including mutations, mistakes, and a conception for things that lie
outside of prescribed categories (such as the unnatural, queer, or maladjusted). I
filter these interests through my own absurdist methodologies to distill meaning
out of scientific models for change and translate them across fields.
The problem of defining the natural has existed at least since Antiquity.
Major changes occurred in the 17 th and 18th centuries, when taxonomists began
the classification of knowledge accumulated during the Renaissance.34 These
classifications persist today and although they reflect a spirit of curiosity in the
development of knowledge, they also serve as pillars for what is normal, defining
things by what category they fit into. Deconstructing this problem through the
lens of posthumanism, Timothy Morton explains in his book Ecology Without
Nature,
“saying that something is unnatural is saying that it does not conform to a norm,
so ‘normal’ that it is built into the very fabric of things as they are. So ‘nature’
occupies at least three places in symbolic language. First, it is a mere empty
placeholder for a host of other concepts. Second, it has the force of law, a norm
against which deviation is measured. Third, ‘nature’ is a Pandora’s box, a word
that encapsulates a potentially infinite series of disparate fantasy objects.” 35

I make spaces where I can bring together symbols of chance and

reproduction, observing a compromised gene pool in my family history and a
marginalized queer space in my chosen family. I use the imagery of small
creatures and other images that multiply and change.
34
35

From pg. 123 of Eric Nordenskiolo’s The History of Biology.
From pg. 14.

36

Image 4.2 – Worms in progress, sculptural elements, 2012

In
Chelonioidea, the concept is the same as in Lithosphere and Stones
Shaped By Chance; repeating elements that create growth. But in Chelonioidea,
the concept is also the content; a collection of objects and memories and
interpretations of a biological morphing, a personal manipulation of changing my
genetic body parts to translate a change into the real world.

If you break apart all your DNA nucleotides (C -A-T-G) into alphabet
soup and stir it up, you’re looking at the same sludge that makes
some person you’ve never met a human. A total stranger can be
made of the same coded letters in the same order as yours. When I
arrived at the clinic, there were special precautions to make sure
the transaction would remain anonymous. We couldn’t accidentally
37

take the same elevator. I walked down a service hallway past some
trash bags and went up the freight elevator to change into my
hospital gown.
I am interested in genetic mutation as a marker for change, and how it
functions within the undertaking of redefining the concepts of human, living
matter, and the natural. Cultural theorist R. L. Rutsky looks at mutation as it
relates to the changing definition of human:
“[Mutation] cannot be seen as external randomness that imposes itself upon the
biological or material world – nor, for that matter, on the realm of culture. Rather,
mutation names that randomness which is always already immanent in the
processes by which both material bodies and cultural patterns replicate
themselves.” 36

Rather than seeing mutation as an outside, destructive force, and its byproducts
as mutants, it is a part of change and growth. What are the relationships between
the overlapping elements of natural and fabricated worlds, what do their
mutations look like, and how can they be represented visually to address the
changing definitions of life and nature?

36

From pg. 110 -11 of t he article “Mutation, History and Fantasy in the Posthuman.”

38

Image 4.3 – Mutant Hybrids Reproducing , 2012

This project addresses the evolution of living species and the cybernetic
organism by addressing the boundaries between these categories (person vs.
machine, animal vs. plant, etc.) In order to explore the space and/or overlap
between natural and fabricated elements, I use source material and create
imagery based on forms that fall outside of traditional taxonomic efforts.
Examples include lichens (a combination of algae and fungus37), slime molds
(colonies whose members differentiate into body parts), and creatures found in

37

Lichens are organisms that are classified as combinations of two or more symbiotic partners,
usually an algae and a fungus. “In general lichens exist as discrete thalli [plant bodies] and are
implicitly treated as individuals in many studies, even though they may be a symbiotic entity
involving three kingdoms! From a genetic and evolutionary perspective lichens can certainly not
be regarded as individuals and this fact has major implications fo r many areas of investigation,
such as developmental and reproductive studies.” From Thomas H. Nash III’s Lichen Biology.

39

the Burgess Shale (extinct pre-cursors to arthropods38). I also use geometric
forms and non-living objects to pose natural and fabricated subjects in a
dialectics with the concept of natural.
Donna Haraway constructs the myth of the cyborg/monster to represent
marginalized people in late capitalism as having fractured identities. Post
-modernism and multinationalism are mutually dependent factors in creating these
new identities - “Monsters have always defined the limits of community in
Western imaginations.”39 Cyborg politics is however, not about repairing these
fractures, but rather about adopting these traits as a strategy for fighting back,
making noise/pollution and defying categories. “Cyborg writing is about the power
to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the
tools to mark the world that marked them as other.” 40
Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, struggled to
define life based on the smallest unit of measurable self-replicative ability – the
cell. I am interested in how the problem of the closed system (represented by the
cell), can be represented with visual language. Breaking down life into its
smallest unit is absorbed into information theory: “Now even biology has become
an information science, a subject of messages, instructions, and code. [...] Life
spreads by networking. The body itself is an information processor. 41” The body
is no longer necessarily considered a living organism that is separate from
language and machines – all three share the problem of coding. Donna Haraway

38

From Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould.
From pg. 37 of A Manifesto for Cyborgs by Donna Haraway.
40
Ibid pg 33.
41
From pg. 8 of The Information by James Gleick.
39

40

points out the political implications of this view:
“communication science and modern biologies are constructed by a common
move – the translation of the world into a problem of coding , a search for a
common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and
all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, a nd
exchange.” 42

Life is a mutated code that shares elements with non-life. The parts can be
interchangeable.

Image 4.4 – Tree Fall , sculpture, 2012

42

From pg. 23 of A Manifesto for Cyborgs.

41

Image 4.5 – Assemblage #1 , with detail 2012

Image 4.6 – Cone Ring Worm #2 , with detail, 2012

Us ing symbols as a code in an artwork is similar to imagining DNA as a
code for understanding life forms. When the Human Genome Project was
42

completed, science and medicine dreamed of progressing infinitely. This fell
apart. Translating life into a code didn’t necessarily provide instructions for how
to create the perfect cure or the best human. When I use repeating symbols I
reveal a process, rather than an answer.
Like Stephen Jay Gould, I reject the positivist notion that time moving
forward indicates progress. In his book Wonderful Life, he describes how the
story of the Burgess Shale illustrates “[t]he history of life [as] a story of massive
removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not the
conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.” 43
The image of evolution as a ladder climbing upward or a widening cone are
misleading and created a possible worldview wherein time is equated with
progress, rather than a shifting set of relationships with no end goal in mind.

43

From pg. 25.

43

Image 4.7 – Uninstalling Tree Fall, 2012

I’m dealing with things morphing and multiplying and becoming, but

they all started from a place. There is a connector that makes
everything similar. It’s not about repopulating the world. It’s no t a
direct response to the Holocaust, but there is a response to the
response to the Holocaust in a way. A decentering of an entire
group of people being separated. They morphed and multiplied in
another way that was not by chance but by choice (the choice of
someone else deciding their genetic trajectory.) These choices
were marked by drawings – triangles, geometric shapes. They were
numbered and equated to objects and intangibles. The
psychological undercurrent that was passed on to me and is still
present and alive. Instead of going to Israel to make up for a past I
44

never had or make my culture alive in that way, I’m actually making
it alive in another way – to regenerate life through knowledge, but
also through actual regeneration.44
This is the moment when the idea of using repetitive drawing to imply a
biological process, became concept and content. I embodied a type of
mechanical reproduction when I became an egg donor, while documenting and
interpreting it through my studio practice.
Assisted Repr oductive Technology (ART) is a developing field that
includes In Vitro Fertilization, Egg and Sperm Donation, and other processes by
which fertilization occurs without intercourse. By embodying this technology, and
observing the process and outcomes through my studio methodology, I enter the
conversation around it from multiple research angles. Cultural, political, socio
-economic and scientific implications of ART on a global and philosophical scale
are areas for consideration here. The central ethical questions around ART
include political and medical regulatory agencies, religious perspectives, and
bioethics in terms of the long-term health and financial concerns for participants.
Health outcomes for parties who participate in ART (families, agencies, doctors,
clinics, etc.) and the changing definitions of life and family are both primary
concerns for me. The prevalence of this technology in North America is such that
it affects the way we think about the body, family, and reproduction on a personal
level. One complexity of this technology is that it is perceived as non-traditional,
but is used to create what appears as a traditional family unit. (See Appendix –
text/ annotated bibliography from my internship)
44

Notes from a conversation with Felicia E. Gail.

45

This process is interpreted in fragments of ske tches, drawings and other
minutia and observations of detail that become parts of a larger work.

Image 4.8 – Fast Like A Dart / In the Petrified Forest After A Cleansing Storm , with detail, 2012

The outcome of this project culminates in a series of assemblages,
drawings, installation and performance that can mutate and re-form each other
and whose parts were interchanged many times. The outcomes shown here are
the iterations that I believe best illustrate Chelonioidea right now, but will never
be the final resting place for each segment.
Chelonioidea is a genealogical name, the group of sea turtles that return
to the sea to lay their eggs. It is a sub-set of biological taxonomy called the
family.

46

Conclusion – A Cleansing Storm

Image 5.00 Images from Final Installation and Final Exhibition

I was born in the biggest city in the United States, at a time when
growth and upward mobility were endless expectations. This
morning I looked at La Guardia underwater. I saw the security
camera screen still, water rushing out of a flooded Port Authority
station elevator shaft. The Shining but with more ghosts.

If you draw a map connecting the spots where everyone in my
family was born, it fits right inside the map of the Con Edison
blackout during the hurricane. It darkened all of my most important
parts of the city in one brilliant explosion.

The absurdity of trying to collect and catalog everything that makes us
whole is an embrace with futility. We want moments of illumination, connections
within chaos, glimpses of other creatures passing in the dark. Letting go is an
important skill for transitioning from one way of thinking to another. Mutation is
unpredictable, it is an essence that cannot be controlled. When I installed this
47

final exhibition, it took twenty-seven hours of sitting in the space, listening to the
architecture and the materials, responding to the forms in space and the
emotional content of each object. The morphing of science fiction and personal
fiction (in writing and in visual formations) to create an alternate reality is only
one example of controlling the illusion of making facts out of information. In these
projects I think of science fiction as a model for imagining the future and the
format for creating a piece of artwork.
When we don’t know something yet, in science, we can build a theory and
then wait for enough facts to support it that it becomes common knowledge. In
science fiction, we can act out intuitively, what we know to be true about the
future, and illustrate it with our imaginations. Then we wait for science to catch
up.
Whether through the use of modular units / building blocks to create forms
in my installations, or the manipulation of genetic codes to create alternative
families, I am creating a mutated pattern that acts as a Petri dish for a new kind
of life. Through this process I intend to open the way for re-thinking political
structures on a larger scale.

48

Image 5. 0 - Derek Woodward, Cashtub, digital image, 2012

45

Image 5.1 - Derek Woodward, Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, digital image, 2012

45

46

Image used with permission from the artist.
Image used with permission from the artist. Taken at the Best W estern in Long Island City, New
York City, in June of 2012.
46

49

Appendix A – ART Project: Annotated Bibliography
1. Assisted Human Reproduction Act. Department of Justice. Canada, 2004.
<http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/A-13.4/FullText.html>

This docum ent is the full text of the Canadian Act that prohibits various
activities related to Assisted Reproduction. This text also contains useful
definitions of various related terms. It establishes a regulatory body, The Assisted
Human Reproduction Agency of Canada, whose duty is to protect the human
rights of those involved in various aspects of Assisted Reproductive Technology.
This Act also addresses other factors that are relevant to my research on
mutations and hybrids, such as: “no person shall create a chimera, or transplant
a chimera into either a human being or a non-human life form.”

2. Arizona House Bill 2036, Senate Engrossed House Bill, State of Arizona,
House of Representatives, Fiftieth Legislature, Second Regular Session, 2012.
PDF.

The Arizo na House Bill passed in 2012 that states "’[g]estational age’
means the age of the unborn child as calculated from the first day of the last
menstrual period of the pregnant woman.” This means that when a pregnant
woman is receiving medical care, the amount of time that she has been pregnant
for is different than the amount of time that has elapsed since conception.

50

Effectively this law prohibits women from terminating a pregnancy past a certain
date, but it also is an attempt to redefine life by deciding when it begins and when
it ends. Laws like this show what is at stake in the biological project of defining
life - being able to communicate well outside the scientific community is crucial
for this project. Bodies of knowledge in this field should be used to prevent
harmful legislation.

3. Critical Art Ensemble.The Molecular Invasion. “Transgenic Production and
Cultural Resistance: A Seven-Point Plan.” 2002.

The Critical Art Ensemble, a collective of artists/writers working as
activists in the fields of science and technology, produced this text as a critique of
government intervention and/or endorsement of transgenic technologies. This
pertains specifically to Genetically Modified Organisms and the food supply
chain, and related ecological concerns. However, their main concern is opening
up the discussion between “experts” and “amateurs” so that multiple voices can
contribute to the public discussion on sensitive and timely scientific issues.

Gleick, James.The Information. United States of America: Pantheon Books,
2011.

The bridges between the history of information theory and contemporary
biology are crossed back and forth in this book. “Now even biology has become

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an information science, a subject of messages, instructions, and code.” The tenth
chapter, “Life’s Own Code – The Organism Is Written in the Egg” is especially
instructive in connecting the two.

4. Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto For Cyborgs.”The Haraway Reader. New
York: Routledge, 2004.

This text helps me connect some of the seemingly disparate parts of my
research: transgressive science fiction, gender equality/post-feminism, and
political/manifesto writing. I am interested in Haraway as someone who has a
background in the history of science but is also concerned with feminism,
hybrids, and defining nature.

5. Lewontin, R.C.Biology As Ideology. “A Reasonable Skepticism.” Toronto:
House of Anansi Press, 1991.

This essay takes a critical look at what biology means, and how it is used
to process and present information. It exposes the problems of time, money and
society having influence within the scientific process and thus affecting the
outcomes. Science can never be outside of / governing society because it is part
of society. Science as an institution claims to be “objective and nonpolitical” – this
essay explains that this cannot be possible and we must remember that when
using scientific facts or information. This essay also tracks the historical

52

intellectual shift from seeing individuals as resulting from society, to seei ng
society as resulting from individuals. The accompanying shift to the importance of
tiny discrete particles such as molecules, genes, etc. is an important part of my
research.

6. Reilly, Philip R.The Molecular Gaze; Art In The Genetic Age. “A New
Eugenics?” New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2004.

This article assesses contemporary artists working with concepts around
biological reproduction through the lens of Assisted Reproductive Technology.
Frida Kahlo, Kiki Smith, Laurie Anderson and many others are described as
having exposed important questions about genetic relatedness. “The inability to
bear a biologically related child appears in popular culture as a devastating loss
of the genetic bond.” One question I am asking is: what IS the genetic bond?
Where do we draw the line? If a donor or surrogate has contributed to the birth of
a child, what is their relationship to that child? Why is it so important to maintain
the standard of the nuclear family?

7. Reference re. Assisted Human Reproduction Act, 2010. Supreme Court of
Canada. December 22, 2010.
http://scc.lexum.org/en/2010/2010scc61/2010scc61.html

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This document is a judgment from the Supreme Court of Canada
summarizing the passage of the Assisted Human Reproduction Act in 2004. Its
main concerns are to prevent, on a federal level, “human cloning, the
commercialization of human reproductive material and the reproductive functions
of women and men, and the use of in vitro embryos without consent.” The court
cites as its main guiding principle, the parliament’s concern with “the fundamental
importance ascribed to human autonomy.” The document also outlines the
constitutionality of ruling on the subject of Assisted Reproductive Technology,
while leaving room for provincial laws to grow in support of the positive aspects
of ART.

8. Roof, Judith.The Poetics of DNA. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2007.

Roof’s discussion on DNA and the gene points to a translation of scientific
concepts into the cultural fabric, using cinema and the arts as examples. She
discusses the impact of Enlightment-era scientific thought on today’s pop science
atmosphere, straddling the concepts of art and science. She also presents ideas
of genetic reproduction as having influence on how we think about artistic
reproduction. This is important in my studio methods, which often combine
recently or nearly obsolete technologies for image reproduction with imagery
reflecting concerns in biological reproduction.

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Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix.A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
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