Roxy Paine

Roxy Paine will exhibit recent work relating to the Fungi Kingdom, including a new "art-making" machine. Using strategies of technical virtuosity, trompe l’oeil, ambiguity, and enigma, Paine poses questions relating to the perception of objects, the experience of sensation, and, by extension, the nature of reality and artificiality.

Paine’s inventions range from elaborate contraptions to the deceptively simple. In SCUMAK (Auto Sculpture Maker), extruded thermoplastic, alternately heated and cooled to achieve a specific height, is formed into blob-like shapes that automatically move down a conveyer belt. The production process fabricates unique sculptures that echo the function of Paint Dipper, a mechanized painting machine exhibited at the gallery in 1997.

In Vibrating Field, grass on a large section of earth is caused to vibrate by an unseen, silent motor. The observed phenomenon defies and transcends the literal to the hallucinatory.

The paintings take as their subject a variety of fungi. Paine plays with the idea of the painting process in Large Fungus Painting, which consists of excrescent slime and crust fungi, first crafted from polymer to attain dimensionality and then placed on a white surface. Painting is thus defined by the growth of objects from a surface rather than the making of marks. Encased paintings of dry rot, simultaneously seductive and repulsive, suggest the properties of the fungus – a foreign, unwelcome body that is taking over the case and destroying it.

In other works, forms of life inhabit improbable settings. In Puffball Field, large-scale, globose puffballs rest on a carpet-covered table. In Fungus Formica Field, various stemmed and crust fungi, both deadly and beneficial, adhere to a Formica surface.

The exhibition will also include Crop (Poppy Field), a replicant, displaced chunk of earth, startlingly beautiful yet alluding to a latent potential for destruction that lies within.

Roxy Paine received the 1997 Aldrich Museum of Art Trustees Award for an Emerging Artist. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, and Nine International Artists at the Wanas Foundation, Sweden. He will have a one-person exhibition at the Lunds Konsthall, Sweden in March 1999.

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Roxy Paine