project specimen
DETAILS
Medium — Oil and acrylic on hand-cut MDF, with paper mache, poured acrylic skin, and collage
Format — Eight panels: four 2 × 2 ft squares, four 2 ft circles
Year — 2018–2019
Origin — Semester-long series, Painting, Rutgers University–Newark. Studio Art minor. Taught by Jordan Casteel.
Subjects — Human eye · Autumn leaves · Skin · Rose
An eye. A rose. Autumn leaves. A piece of skin with light coming through it.
You decided a long time ago what these things look like, and you were right, and you were only ever seeing one version.
Everything has a second one. A rose petal is thousands of raised velvet cones. Skin is cells stacked like shingles on a roof. An iris is a landscape — ridges, valleys, terrain you could walk across. None of it is hidden. It's just built at a size that isn't ours, so we've agreed not to count it.
That agreement is arbitrary. We call something beautiful based on an accident of how far away we happen to stand from it.
Project Specimen paints four familiar things at both scales and hangs them next to each other. The squares are oil paintings, two feet each. The circles are what's underneath, magnified past the point where painting alone could carry it. I cut every panel by hand from MDF.
The pairing is the argument. The macroscopic world gets the traditional format. The microscopic one gets to break it.
The beauty of seeing.
How the circles were made
I poured acrylic paint onto plastic sheets, let it cure, and peeled it off in flexible skins. Then I cut them, punched them, shredded them into strings, and rebuilt each texture from the material itself.
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The iris — paper mache hills and valleys under acrylic skin, following the ridged topography of the real thing.
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The skin — acrylic sheets layered in a brick pattern, because that's the actual arrangement of the cells that make up ours.
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The rose — the velvet you feel on a petal is thousands of tiny raised cones. Paper mache mounds, skinned in dried acrylic.
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The leaf — pouches filled with hole-punched acrylic dots and stringy cuts of skin, standing in for plant cells and what's suspended inside them.
