Margaux Crump

Stilled Chimera

Archival digital pigment print, insect specimens, velvet, frame.

20 x 24 11/16 x 2 1/8 inches

2018

For print availability, please contact me

Stilled Chimeras are glimpses into fantastical ecologies of human wonder and desire, where things are not always what they seem. In this world, botanical arrangements are hybrid creatures composed of plants, fungi, animals, insects, and dicklettes.

Cast from roots and fruit, dicklettes are fleshy silicone sculptures that recall both animal and vegetal bodies.

To humans, they seem phallic, clitoral, and teat-like, but I like to imagine that a carrot would look at them and see peculiar, pinkish carrots. Like a rhizome or mushroom fruiting body, dicklettes appear sporadically, growing in and out of the bouquets, comfortably nestled amongst the floral genitalia.

Consisting of myriad beings, this work expands on the forest still life paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. Rather than displayed in a vase, these bosstilleven floral arrangements appear to be growing on the forest floor amidst mushrooms, moss, and small woodland creatures.

Yet the flowers depicted cannot naturally grow in this environment and often bloom in different seasons. These meticulously crafted scenes are constructs built on our impressions of the natural world; the order and disorder we imagine there; the beauty that mesmerizes us; the abundance we perceive as ours for the picking.