Anatomies

Inman Gallery, Houston, TX

May 8 — June 19, 2010

For Anatomies, Waterston presented a multi-media installation that evokes the empiricism and fantasy of 16th and 17th century wunderkammern. Waterston’s gallery-scale cabinet of curiosity accumulates and arranges found, collected, and artist-constructed objects: biological specimens and book pages, anatomies and artifacts, totems and talismans, as well as a bounty of new, related paintings, works on paper, and the artist’s first foray into sculpture. Together these oddities comprise an idiosyncratic catalogue of organic and man-made forms; representation and abstraction; and material and spirit—all filtered through Waterston’s unique artistic sensibility.

The late Renaissance “wonder-room”, the progenitor of both the contemporary natural history museum and the encyclopedic art museum, blurred the scientific and artistic categories we commonly hold today. As the creator of each collection attempted to present a total view of the world, distinctions between the known and the imagined, between fact and myth also merged. Revisiting this impulse on the west wall of Inman Gallery’s main gallery, Waterston assembles foxtails, minerals, watercolor drawings, and ink renderings into a single, sensorially-loaded, shelf-bound collage. Herein the artist presents many objects from his personal collection, a trove of mementos whose formal qualities have served as inspiration for his past and current artistic production. In particular Waterston reveals a fascination for aberrant visual morphologies, their transfiguration and sublimation—a field of potentiality that mirrors his belief in liminal and animistic states of being. Seventy-five works on paper intimate moments of transformation, including depictions of volatile nocturnal and cosmological landscapes. Other works comprise archival illustrations Waterston has appropriated and then modified, mutating each into a new image of evolution, typically both ecstatic and horrific 

The sculptures on view alluringly explore hypertrophied forms. For each, Waterston fused numerous primary anatomical structures such as skeletons and shells into scholar-rock-like masses. Paintings of forests and animals forms similarly “grow,” transmuting from images to objects. Other paintings capture ghostly silhouettes, suggesting memories, or existences beyond the corporeal. Anatomies, as a whole, embodies the diversity and multidirectionality of natural, artistic, and spiritual striving. Waterston portrays death and life, development and decay as concomitant to a unified, wondrous vision of creation.