WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS.- The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis presents "Roxy Paine/Second Nature," on view through July 14, 2002. Over the past five years, Roxy Paine has been creating two distinctive groups of objects--surrogate art-making machines and faux botanical specimens. These works have attracted considerable attention, culminating in the inclusion of his "Bluff", a fifty-foot steel stree in Central Park, in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Curators and critics have cristened him as one of the current generation of new media artists: a categorization that he rejects. Although Paine does not work in a particular medium or a definable style, his art does exhibit a consistent, if nonlinear, conceptual unity.
Paine explains that his art "is all about perception." He is intensely engaged in an inquiry of how people perceive information and construct knowlege. The three robotic art machines and the botanical vignettes in this exhibition force us to confront, or even alter, our perceptions about the act of creation and the roles of art, machines, and nature. The sleek painting, drawing, and sculpture machines are programmed by the artist to mechanize the creative process. The resulting works of art such as those from his Painting Manufacture Unit (PMU) have a physical presence and richness reminiscent of Minimal Art. At the same tme, Paine creates faux natural worlds that blur the distinction between image and reality. Paine and his assistants painstakingly mold and hand paint each plant, then assemble them in groups that reflect the randomness and chance of nature.
With these two bodies of work Paine subverts viewer expectation, forcing us to question our perceptions of creativity. The artist builds machines that prodcue objects d’art that one would expect to be made entirely by hand. Man builds machines, machines make art, and man creates nature. The cycle of his creative conception stimulates a series of questions about machanical, natural, and human creation. Roxy Paine has developed an intruiging body of work that raises some potent questions about contemporary art and culture at this moment of transformation from the mechanical to the information age.
In conjunction with the exhibition, The Rose welcomes back to Boston David Ross, former director of the Museum of Modern Art, San Fransisco, and the ICA, Boston. Ross will lecture on Roxy Paine and New Media Art on May 9, at 6:00 pm. In addition, Roxy Paine and Scott Rothkopf of Harvard University will deliver a gallery talk to discuss his distinctive work on June 6 at 7:00 pm. An illustrated catalog with an introduction, an interview with the artist, and an essay by critic Gregory Volk will accompany the show. To request a copy, please contact us.
Roxy Paine/Second Nature is co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (CAMH) and The Rose. The exhibition is cocurated by Joseph D. Ketner, director of The Rose, and Lynn Herbert, senior curator of CAMH. Following its showing at The Rose, the exhibition will be on display at CAMH from October 13, 2002, to January 12, 2003. The exhibition and related programs are made possible by the generous support of Sandra and Gerald Fineberg, the Fine Family Foundation, and the members of The Rose.
