Hybrid Visions

Nicolas Lampert: Hybrid Visions
Machine Animals & Insects
June 6–July 18, 2008
Sabatini Gallery

Artist's website: Nicolas Lampert
Exhibit Curator: Trish Nixon
Article by Heather Kearns

Visual artists who mix stuff together—paper, photographs, seeds, blood, hair, glass, plastic forks—whatever—are using a process called collage (from the French word, coller, meaning "to glue") which got its start as an art form in the early 20th-century with art pallies, Pablo Picasso and George Braque. But the notion of taking favorable parts to create a new whole is evident in other art forms as well. Musicians have been mixing recorded sounds and samples from other artists' work to create new music of their own since the 60s. The Beastie Boys sampled Led Zeppelin's drum intro from When the Levee Breaks to create Rymin' and Stealin', the opening track of their first album, License to Ill (1986), and Dr. Dre mixed it into Lyrical Gangbang from 1992's The Chronic. And just last year, DJ Greg Gillis (Girl Talk) took sampling to a new level on Night Ripper when he remixed hundreds of elements from different songs to create an entirely new one (twelve or more for each track).

The collage concept even makes its way into science and technology, evidenced by biological hybrids and digital mash-ups. We drive hybrid cars which run partly on gas and partly on electricity or solar power. Internet culture engineered the mash-up: taking HTML, graphics, audio and video from various sources and inserting it into our own webpages, or changing the code just enough to customize it for our own needs. The Chicago Police Department created a mash-up using Google Maps and crime statistics that helps people know where crime rates are high. In science, hybrid animals and plants have been developed by combining the best qualities from two different organisms to make something new. For example, a mule results from breeding a horse with a donkey: the mule gets the height and winter coat from the horse, and the better vision and hoof strength from the donkey. Is a mule a mash-up?

The words hybrid and collage share common ground, and artist Nicholas Lampert's collage art, Hybrid Visions, certainly got me thinking about bionics and prosthetics. We sort-of already combine animals with machines right now, on dairy farms. Milk cows spend so much of their life attached to equipment, how far away we are from designing milking "implants" and detachable, refrigerated containers to cross with these animals? Lampert takes it a step further with Locust Tank. Imagine the strength of a war machine combined with the insect's ability to reproduce quickly and freely. Is it possible to fight future wars with insect machines? How far will we go before we create disposable hybrid life forms to do our destructive bidding?

Lampert's hybrid visions of collaged paper and photocopies are a safe way of asking tough questions that scientists have already started answering. The future is now. Perhaps we should pay closer attention.

104 photos | 292 views

items are from between 05 Jun 2008 & 13 Jun 2008.