Roxy Paine

Roxy Paine (born 1966, New York City) is an American painter and sculptor widely known for his installations that often convey elements of conflict between the natural world and the artificial plains man creates.

He was educated at both the College of Santa Fe (now Santa Fe University of Art and Design) in New Mexico and the Pratt Institute in New York.

He eventually dropped out of Pratt, and with help from some of his colleagues, formed the artist collective Brand Name Damages in 1989.

In his body of work, Paine mirrors natural processes, drawing increasingly on the tension between organic and man-made environments, between the human desire for order and nature's drive to reproduce.

His highly detailed simulations of natural phenomena include an ambitious series of hand-wrought stainless steel trees, vitrines of mushroom and plant life in various states of decay and several large-scale machines designed to replicate creative processes.

Many of his works create a platform to ask aesthetic questions about art, the natural, and the unnatural world rather than answer these questions like his counterparts he ignites the flame of inquiry.

Collectively, his works demonstrate the human attempt to impose order on natural forces, depicting the struggle between the natural and the artificial, the rational and the instinctual.

Paine has said, "I'm interested in taking entities that are organic and outside of the industrial realm, feeding them into an industrial system, and seeing what results from that force-feeding. The end results are a seamless containment of these opposites."

Since 1990, Paine's works have been exhibited in major collections and galleries across the United States, Germany, Sweden, England, the Netherlands, and Israel.

His most reviewed exhibitions include Replicants, Machines, Dendroids, and Dioramas.

Roxy Paine currently lives and works in Brooklyn and Treadwell, New York.

Paine was born in New York City and raised in the suburbs of northern Virginia.

Throughout his childhood, he spent his free time exploring the wooded, overgrown areas of land that separated housing developments in his neighborhood.

He describes his experience of growing up in suburbia as a "twisted vision of nature", his environment possessing an "overwhelming blandness".

Around age 13 or 14, Paine used his local creek as a place to explore.

"'There was a creek nearby when I was growing up. That's where I spent most of my time. I would constantly reroute the stream, building dams. I was mostly interested in the water. What I remember distinctly about nature in the suburbs were the borders. The natural world is totally controlled and manipulated in suburbia.'"At age 15, Paine ran away to California to live with his brother, a hiker and rock climber.

His brother's "outdoor western" influence spurred them to hike places like Yosemite and Joshua Tree.

Living in California helped Paine make his decision to become an artist.

He moved to New Mexico and enrolled at the College of Santa Fe, but he soon dropped out due to poor relations with his professors.

"'In general, the teachers hated me. I always had problems with art teachers. I don't know why. I didn't go in trying to be confrontational, but it always ended up with bad blood somehow.'"He then moved to New York and attended Pratt Institute for a time, originally as a painting major but later switching to sculpture.

In addition to paintings, Paine produced unusual, functional ceramic and metal musical instruments.

Paine began showing his work in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1990 and 1991 at an artist run collective called Brand Name Damages (which he helped to found) and he had his first solo exhibition at the short-lived Herron Test-Site in October 1992.

His early work consisted of kinetic and time-based sculptures such as Viscous Pult, 1990, which consisted of a paint brush smearing ketchup, white paint and motor oil on the gallery space's front window; and Displaced Sink, 1992, which had a leaking pipe in the ceiling dripping water on a tall stack of soap bars, leaving a pool of semi-liquid soap to collect on the gallery floor.

His next solo exhibition was at Ronald Feldman Gallery in 1995, and it included other kinetic works, but the central and most critically acclaimed work was a piece called Dinner of the Dictators, 1993–95, a vitrine enclosing the taxidermied favorite meals of infamous dictators, ranging from Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler to Napoleon Bonaparte and Suharto.

The research alone took eight months, and overall, the work took two years to produce, opening Paine to new approaches and processes in his work.

From this point onward, Paine's work separated into a few distinct but nevertheless related categories.

The first involves naturalistic works: minutely precise reproductions of natural objects like mushrooms, leafy plants or poppies.

Crop, 1997–98, shows a field of poppies, with ripened pods exposing the evidence of raw opium being readied for harvest.

The piece embodies the shifting views of the beauty of a field of wild flowers and the grave potential of drug addiction.

A second category consists of machine-based works: he has devised a number of conceptually-challenging art-making machines, like the SCUMAK (Auto Sculpture Maker), 1998, PMU (Painting Manufacturing Unit), 1999–2000, and the Erosion Machine, 2005.

Bridging the gap between the naturalistic and mechanized works, Paine also creates large-scale stainless steel trees and boulders of varying sizes (ranging from 8 – 50 feet in height).

Paine's vitrines and botanical works often feature replicas of plants that have been discovered as extremely poisonous or have been used by humans for experimental hallucinogenic or drug experiences.

The living plants are cast and subsequently rendered in thermoset polymers, paint, lacquer, and epoxy, among other materials.

Amanita Muscaria Field, 2000, shows a field of psychoactive mushrooms that appear as if they are sprouting from the gallery floor.

This field might present multiple readings: are these works a hallucinogenic vision on their own or do they represent the plant life that offers the possibility of arriving at that vision?

Another related series of works is that of the Dead Amanita vitrines, lifelike mushrooms seem to be decaying under glass.

The genus Amanita is a group of poisonous and psychoactive mushrooms that has some species that are among the deadliest if ingested by humans.

Another example is the leafy plant genus Datura, which has long been used as a poison and Hallucinogen; many species are known by common names such as Hell's Bells or Devil's weed.

Paine's re-creation of various species of Datura take on a state of potential, presenting us with a deceptively simple plant that nonetheless contains complex molecules that can give rise to an altered state of consciousness.

Removing the artist's hand in the creative process and replacing it with a computer program is the crux of Paine's machine-based works.