Paul Stout MFA

Artist Statement

The formation of our cultural perception in the west in the last several centuries has been the product
of a growing adoration of and reliance on science and technology. From the mechanical clock,
to the steam engine, to the silicon chip, our culture has employed its dominant technologies as the
fundamental if not transcendental laws of nature, laws that are in a word, mechanistic. This perception
has limitations, which become apparent we attempt to reproduce portions of nature, particularly
in cultural production of the hyper-real.
The focus of my work in the last several years has been and remains concerned with this lineage,
the interaction of technology, nature and culture, and how we, as a society, use tangible technological
explanations to describe the natural world. My work is informed and inspired by extensive
personal research in the history of technology, the history of natural history, and the cultural studies
tying these subjects together. In addition I read extensively on current technological innovation and
many aspects of popular culture.
Under the auspices of these culturally dominant cosmologies, and to accentuate the limits of a
mechanistic conceived universe, I fabricate objects in a project based manner and in serial
batches. In the past few years I have built a series of guided missiles to hunt deer, using electronics,
remote control devices, physics, plastics, surveillance technology, foam deer targets, video editing
and projection. Using display conventions from science and museology, plus taxidermy, cabinetmaking,
and projected anthropomorphism, I created an installation of skewed natural history display.
Flowers, road kill pigeons, old clock parts, counting devices and programmed computer
chips, and butterflies, are assembled into robotic vignettes/dioramas/displays of natural ecologies.
This blend of off the shelf mechanical and electronic components and natural and collected materials
interrogates our culture’s cognitive, mechanistic ideas and expectations of the natural.

Paul Stout
stout99999@juno.com
 

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