Rosen Outdoor Sculpture Competition & Exhibition
Twentieth AnniversaryRosen Outdoor Sculpture Competition & Exhibition
Bird Catcher by Colin Beatty

Bird Catcher

Mixed Media

Colin Beatty
Brooklyn, NY

12th Rosen Outdoor Sculpture Competition & Exhibition (1998-1999)

Artist's Comments

Scientific methodology is the point of departure for my work. Having been trained as a scientist, my work deals with the construction and presentation of scientific information. The works are representations of science not as truth, but as stories­ about the author as spokesperson for a culture.

My art work, then, has come to center around finding specific ways to explore the problem of scientific communication, to be directed at producing an alternative science, changing the priorities of science, and releasing the grips of contemporary scientific theories on our imaginations.

The placement of my work-in but somehow void of nature, about but refusing to give over describable data about the natural world, about the viewer's body but also about the body's depleted relevance in the physical world, narrating the subjectivity of the objective scientific experiment­is an attempt to deconstruct the boundaries of understanding through cumbersome, flawed binary systems (nature/culture, human/animal, organism/machine, art/science) returning us to and grounding us in our own bodies, both collective and individual. Hence my analysis of the construction and presentation of scientific information, my analysis through handmade tools and isolated, dissected ecosystems of experimentation, by exaggerating the miscommunication between culturally presented science and the natural and physical world, urges a rethinking of the dissemination of biological understanding.
Colin Beatty

Juror's Comments

Colin Beatty's beautiful Bird Catcher - beautiful but unusual in its combination ot tenting and bird houses - is artfully planted.
John Perreault