Uri Shapira uses different types of metals and chemical concoctions as if they were a palette of colors. He has developed a special technique for “sowing” and cultivating various kinds of growths on metal supports by creating a range of chemical reactions. The application of the chemicals to the metal casts, which are placed in an aquarium, creates the initial composition, while the “flowering” of these mineral plants is partially random. The various plant forms are thus transformed over the course of the exhibition period, until they reach a point of saturation.
For this exhibition, Shapira enlarged the aquarium and the metal casts it contains to unprecedented dimensions to conform to the size of the museum windows and chose one specific type of growth, in accordance with the display conventions characteristic of modern natural history museums. Shapira’s new taxonomy of the mineral kingdom may be described as a humorous allusion to the many changes that have taken place in the classification of animalia and plantea (and of intermediates such as fungi and algae) since the Enlightenment. His fictive claim concerning his creation of a new species of mineral plants, meanwhile, appeals to our curiosity concerning “the exotic other.” This claim obviously cannot be sustained in the contemporary world, in which the unknown can be instantly explored at the click of a button; it may thus be taken as an attempt to echo the experience provoked by artifacts in a cabinet of wonders.
Like displays of curiosities, which attempted to encompass the wonders of the natural world by exhibiting collections of insects, preserved animals, and embalmed birds and mammals, this installation centers on the beauty of the cultivated “plants.” Yet these seemingly natural growths are in fact anorganic formations that camouflage their own metallic makeup. The construction of artificial ecological environments undermines the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial, and opens up onto additional possibilities.
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