1999-2001 Dream of a Hermaphroditic Mother

Abridged Description

Dream of a Hermaphroditic Mother, was an ever-morphing think-tank that has generated a potentially infinite set of offshoots, sidebars, and tangents. At times resembling a hybrid of Jules Verne’s undersea vessel Nautilus and a Fornasetti bedroom ensemble, these projects seek to mimic the inner workings of a mechanical organism and infiltrate the body with a network of behavioral rhizomes.  The work launches from foundations laid by artists like Beuys and Panamarenko, as well as thinkers like Virilio and Deleuze, to mention a couple. All of the work is strategically constructed of materials that embody the remnants of their predecessors.  Paper, cardboard, recycled goods all breakdown while retaining the prototyped forms of our most ambitious technological efforts.  Nestled between the familiar worlds of hardware and software lies wetware: the architecture of flesh envisioned by the marriage of technology and cultural entropy.  What stories do we create to understand our placement within this active mechanism of progress? 

  • “By extracting esthetic morphologies from existing aircraft, the same way an artist extracts meaning from an ‘art object,’ we should find a whole new set of values.”  — Robert Smithson                    

    The forms and figures of flight technology, comprised of the union between heroic aviatory successes and their requisite system of trial-failures lies at the heart of my broad range of investigations. The work is above all a cosmology, a three dimensional diagram, and an encoded private labyrinth.  My projects generate fictional characters in an effort to eliminate static interrelationships within the work.  The Projects infuse self-imposed narratives with the formation of a repersonalized, idiosyncratic New World Order. The histories of jet propulsion and manned space flight are in the catalog of research topics, but then, so are the dress codes of the courts of 17th Century France.  The studio installation follows a similar magical-mechanical path to that of Duchamp’s Bachelor Machine.

    Dream of a Hermaphroditic Mother, was an ever-morphing think-tank that has generated a potentially infinite set of offshoots, sidebars, and tangents. At times resembling a hybrid of Jules Verne’s undersea vessel Nautilus and a Fornasetti bedroom ensemble, these projects seek to mimic the inner workings of a mechanical organism and infiltrate the body with a network of behavioral rhizomes.  The work launches from foundations laid by artists like Beuys and Panamarenko, as well as thinkers like Virilio and Deleuze, to mention a couple. All of the work is strategically constructed of materials that embody the remnants of their predecessors.  Paper, cardboard, recycled goods all breakdown while retaining the prototyped forms of our most ambitious technological efforts.  Nestled between the familiar worlds of hardware and software lies wetware: the architecture of flesh envisioned by the marriage of technology and cultural entropy.  What stories do we create to understand our placement within this active mechanism of progress? 

    The variety of resources brought to bear on the project is too wide to catalog herein its entirety, but a representative element buried within the strata of the Room and its offshoots includes a man and woman superimposed, whose union metastasized through the mechanical action embodied in wind tunnels and turbine engines to produce physical and conceptual elements such as the following: ovarian accelerators, aviation bodies, nipular injectors, mechanical enhancers, a functioning tiled milk fountain, a cardboard tai chi astronaut, cast milk energy cells that fuel the Mothership, atmospheric reentry vehicles constructed from vacuum tubes, various space debris, life-packs, sculpted miniature atomic explosions rendered lovingly in Styrofoam beads, customized habitats of numerically encoded snails whose sole purpose is to digest the schematic plans of the Airship, an anti-hubris tunnel, and a plan to map, in real-time, the evolution of a fictional family from courtship to conception to infancy to childhood to maturity, old-age, death and back again forever.  The interpretive conceit here is the mobilization of internal resources to alter external reality by means of enacting physical absurdities on objects and environments drawn from the fields of aviation and space research. 

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Into the Woods