Roxy Paine Timelapse

Neuron (2010), Biennale of Sydney installation

Film produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. 

About Roxy Paine
Born 1966 in New York, USA 
Lives and works in New York 

Roxy Paine’s work examines systems of growth and decay by setting them against processes of organic evolution and industrial construction. Entropy – the inevitable and steady running down of all energy – both man-made and natural, is counterbalanced by possibilities for regeneration and creation.

His work is nearly always based on a creation of tension between organic and man-made environments. This has been expressed, at different times, in vitrines of meticulously replicated mushroom and plant life (often poisonous or hallucinogenic) in varying states of decay: in large-scale automated machines designed to create paintings or sculptures as end products; and, most recently, in a series of large structures based on the forms of trees with their roots exposed that have been handmade out of industrial stainless steel pipe. These latter works are generically called Dendroids.

In 2009, for the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he made Maelstrom, the largest Dendroid to date. He described this as conveying five ideas at once: ‘a forest downed by an enormous destructive force, both natural and man-made; the force itself, churning and violent; the trees in the process of becoming abstract; a factory pipeline run amok; and a mental storm, like the electric pulses that run through the brain during epileptic seizures.’

When cut, manipulated, welded together and polished, these works echo the vast forms of trees and industrial machinery as well as minute intra-body forms such as nerves, synapses and blood vessels. A tension results from the fractal relation between these diverse source-forms that mirror each other on macro and micro scales. Paine started this series in 1998 and they continue to the present, ‘… they all have dendritic structures – trees, neural networks, vascular systems – as their root.’

Paine’s working method has always been concerned with breaking things down into component parts in order to reconstruct them. Partly, this is a process of understanding how the world is put together, but it is also an acknowledgement that nothing is pure because it depends on, or relates to, something else. In this way, his visual and structural rhymes and paradoxes become a source of security rather than perplexity or degeneration. Neuron (2009–10), the vast new Dendroid shown for the first time in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, continues this idea, focusing even more on the idea of dendrites and synapses, the means by which information and experience are electrically transmitted through a body.