Roxy Paine
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Roxy Paine (born 1966 )is a high-tech environmental artistwho has had original work in many solo and group exhibitions. Paine lives and actively works in New York City.
His early work with which he made his first entrance into the art world falls logically into two distinct categories. The first group contains his naturalistic works: minutely precise reproductions of natural objects like mushrooms and poppies, or fifty-foot, stainless steel elm trees. The second group is mechanical: he has devised a number of conceptually-challenging art-making machines, like the PMU (Painting Manufacturing Unit.)
Paine is probably most well-known for his steel trees, which are not only precisely designed to look like real trees, but to actually ‘work’ like living, growing trees. When Paine’s Bluff (a metal tree installation in NYC) was opened, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the first to step to the podium, joked that Paine’s work was New York’s response to the Asian long-horned beetles which had been causing trouble with the park’s real trees.
His mechanical works seem to tackle deconstructing art and introduce the idea of mechanized creativity. His exhibitions usually include at least one ‘art’-making machine as well as his more biologically-inspired works. This collision of the natural with the mechanical is repeated in each of the types of works themselves. For example, Weed Choked Garden seems to be a humble recreation of a patch of garden which is actually made of metal and plastic. On the other hand, his machines seem to automatically emulate a natural, human quality—creativity—and every work produced by PMU or SCU-MAK is unique.
In 1997, Paine was awarded the Trustees Award for an Emerging Artist. He has standing exhibitions in museum collections around the world, from New York to D.C. to California to Nebraska, from the Netherlands to Jerusalem to Spain to Sweden.
