The Laboratory of Unintended Forms

-creates conditions for biological process to operate without direction and observes what emerges.

Color photographic emulsion — the material substrate of the image — is subjected to microbial activity, chemical reaction, oxidation, and decay, then retrieved and examined as form. What the process produces is not abstract. It is specific: vascular structures, cellular architectures, the interior geometries of living systems. The works are studies in the literal sense — observations made under controlled conditions of what biological process does when given freedom to do it.

The titles locate these observations precisely. Taste of Blood and Violence. Device for Capturing a Rabbit. Incubator. The laboratory is not neutral. What biology produces, when examined without sentiment, looks like predation, like containment, like the mechanisms by which living things are caught and held and transformed. The entropic process that the practice uses elsewhere as a medium for elegy here reveals itself as something older and less consoling — the logic of biological life, which has always involved capture, consumption, and the conversion of one form into another.

These works are the practice’s most direct confrontation with what biological process actually is, beneath the poetry of impermanence and the aesthetics of decay. They are evidence.