Handscape Agglomerate

The installation consists of a collection of material used to create an expansive composition comprised of synthetic rocks and trees, a series of orchestrated cuckoo birds, a smoke machine, glass beads, packing tape, lumber, wildlife decoys, synthetic turf and many other materials.

Parts of the landscape are meticulously rendered to resemble the glazier-scrapped face of a granite cliff, while other points within the installation scarcely holds together illusion of the natural amidst the mere taping of stacked boxes. What is revealed within the installation is a curious intersection between the near authentic and the contrasting abstracted reference to the natural.

The work explores our capacity to suspend disbelief and our ability to meld our perceptions in order to fit within a predetermined notion of what it is we are seeing. We can choose to engage a mock rock as a rock or a plastic Christmas tree as a pine or spruce, despite our underlying awareness to the contrary. The limits in the ability to do so are tested within the installation amidst the points of full abstraction and the injection of slightly bizarre elements. The at times conflicting collection of these manufactured elements do not set out to past judgment – synthetic good, synthetic bad – rather their collective association questions and examines our relationship to the increasingly manufactured environments around us, and our interest in mimicking things natural. The absurdity of this peculiar installation sets a playing field in which our existing relationship to the synthetic can be explored; It’s fiction shedding light on the reality (or recreated reality) of the world we live in.