Insects at Moore!!

Vinyl specialist Gibbs Connors and his team working on the installation.

Moore College of Art & Design's Paley gallery is infested with a plague that came from Brazil. It's Regina Silveira's Mundus Admirabilis, an installation done with plotter-cut vinyl. The images of the insects come from a variety of sources, most of them 18th and 19th-Century entomology books, which are combined and juxtaposed to form a dense pattern of legs, wings, feelers and all kinds of hairy parts. In the midst of the space there will be a table with an embroidered cloth, set with screen-printed white china with similar motifs.

This installation makes part of a larger exhibition that the artist had in Sao Paulo on the theme of the biblical plagues. As Lorie Mertes, Director and Chief Curator of the galleries at Moore has remarked, "instead of locusts, hail and pestilence, Silveira uses a domestic setting invaded by common pests to suggest that the plagues in our own time are the images that contaminate our everyday existence: crime and violence, degradation of the environment, corruption, and other ills that invade our lives and psyches."

Moore Curatorial studies major Monika Kuder worked for two months at Gibbs Connors' studio, "weeding" more than a thousand feet of vinyl to reveal the image in Regina's work. Check this link for more details on the process.

Paul Morrison, Phytochrome, 2008. Acrylic paint on wall. Site-specific installation for LvaM, Las Vegas. Image courtesy of the artist and Alison Jacques Gallery, London.

Also working from old illustrated books, British artist Paul Morrison creates enigmatic collages where the proportions of the components are skewed to produce a sense of uncanniness. When blown to architectural proportions, these collages acquire an impressive presence, and to experience them is like stepping inside an oversized children's book gone awry (not that I've done that, though!)

The stencil gets affixed to the prepared surface

Then the surfaces that will be painted are peeled away.

Paint gets applied and the stencil removed

... and the work gets assembled.

As I reported before, Paul's lovely assistant Bianka spent almost two weeks preparing the stenciled mural, which will go up on a long wall on Moore's façade on 20th street when the climate gets a little warmer (by the way, the forecast for the last weeks of January looks promising -surely the only side benefit of global warming).

José Roca.