Chris Garofalo


The first thing you may notice in this photograph is that there is a lot of stuff. There are natural objects (shells, sea urchins, geodes, seed pods, rocks), and there are what Thomas Demand called "symbolic representations of nature" in his description of La Carte d'Aprés Nature, the exhibition he curated in 2010. Look closely and you will see plastic animals, drawings, paintings, and postcards of animals, plants, dinosaurs, and microscopic creatures. There's a nature show on the TV and ceramic vegetables hanging about. The sculptures on the table, some of which were in Demand's exhibition, are a familiar, if not exactly recognizable amalgam of plant, animal and fungus, representative of a more abstract nature. In my flower and animal-skin fabrics, I am camouflaged to blend in with all the other domesticates.