In Between
Lylian Klimek

At this point in time it is interesting to embark on a series of works: sculpture and installation, which address the notion of art inspired by events occurring in “the in between time”—the time of transition between the natural and the simulated, what some writers refer to as a transition from the industrial age to a biotech age. This series of works provides a glimpse into a world where science fact and science fiction morph and new forms appear: alien, artificial, fake, fantastic.

Scientists are now splicing, re-combining, and inserting living material from plants and animals to create goods for commerce. Genes are the raw material and genome mapping is creating a genetic library for commercial exploration and exploitation – a biotech revolution that will impact every aspect of human life. It appears that the tempo of intervention in the natural world is escalating as humans remake nature: plants, animals, humans, from the inside out in the laboratory. Thanks to rapid advances in computer science and the life sciences, science is rapidly developing the capability not only to alter life forms but to transform them into almost unrecognizable forms. What could only be imagined now appears to be in the realm of the possible—a kind of ultimate in the commodification of nature.

These works, drawing on science fiction and developments in the life sciences as sources and resources, are minimal in form (even Brancusi would approve) but with an emphasis on surface and embellishment. They appear recognizable as part of the plant world but have undergone a process of transformation to become creations for the “in between time,” between the natural and the artificial, between the real and the imaginary. Taken from the natural world plant forms are transformed via software manipulations and surface decoration, to become hybrids, a fusion of unlikely bedfellows, which retain vestiges of their origin in nature.

Although the work represents a fantastical world of plant forms, it also hints at a trivial and superficial overlay of natural phenomena, referencing the emphasis on image rather than substance in life science research and the marketing of everything including patents on life.

-Lylian Klimek

Exhibition date: May 26 – June 18, 2005

gallery  Members'  Rae