Mark Dion
Mark Dion
From an article by Jim Lewis on the New York Times blog on the occasion of Dion's show Phantoms of the Clark Expedition at the Explorers Club earlier this year:
Dion, then, is working in a ghostly space in between institutions, between cities, centuries and theories and practices; in response he’s made a spectral show, fabricating the materials that Clark would have brought with him — including a campfire, provision boxes, instruments and tools, the revolver the haplessly murdered cartographer left behind in camp and a few biological specimens (squirrel, giant moth, dead pig) — all of them (except the squirrel) made out of unpainted papier-mâché and carefully arranged on the main table of the Trophy Room, where they’re overseen by a marble bust of Clark himself. They look ashen and uninflected, like so many survivors of Pompeii, the wraithlike leftovers of an adventure that was part science project and part amateur guerrilla war, part benign and sincere, part high-handed and clumsy.
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