Insects Cannot Know Love
Cast urethane, hair, wood, urethane foam, neon lights, perspex, steel . 2030 x 815 x 1500 mm . 2010

This work takes, as its departure points, several seemingly unrelated subjects and contexts. In part, it relates quite closely to an earlier, unrealised, film work titled The Revel Fox. The film was ‘unrealised’ due to two reasons – firstly, I was at the time engaged in the conceptual dogma framed as All Theory. No Practice. which excluded the material manifestation of any artworks. Secondly, the principle subject of the film – a South African architect named Revel Fox – unfortunately died whilst I was engaged in said dogma. For this exhibition titled END GAME – I wanted to animate and construct a circular journey for a number of branches of my practice – both thematically and conceptually, as well as in an idiosyncratic and very personal way. For the exhibition itself the graphic ‘stick device’ developed and articulated in very early works like Paperless Office, The Healthy World of Primitive Building Methods and Or Until the World Improves will be installed within the gallery space as an installation of 12 black wooden planks exactly the height of the floor to ceiling. With the title of the exhibition – END GAME – signaling a philosophical resignation and material conclusion to this 10 year process and direction.

In keeping with this sentiment – at present I am actively engaged in the material manufacture and production of tangible, viewable and sellable artworks – there remains some regret that the project The Revel Fox was not made timeously. The resulting work, titled Insects Cannot Know Love, is a grotesque and corporeal requiem to this project; this architect I never met and, in part, to my former way of working. The domestic minimalism of the laundry drying rack originally intended for The Revel Fox has morphed and grown into its mutated twin – an exhumed, museuological relic, laboriously inching its way out of the archive since 2004. Seemingly the product of bizarre biological folly or unorthodox zoological deformity, the sculpture tries to articulate – in a polemical form through abstract sculptural means – the ambiguous alchemy of nostalgia and ambition that I now find myself in.

REFERENCE –

The Revel Fox
Found object (wood, vinyl), cable-ties, varnish . 1200 x 300 x 500 mm . 2004 (destroyed)
Installation view: True/Story, KZNSA Gallery, Durban, 2008

Michael MacGarry