Nicolas Lamas

Peruvian artist Nicolàs Lamas creates installations and sculptures that, well I’ll let Nicolàs’ words explain:

My work is created to contrast the perception that we have about what belongs to the natural order with dislocated structures that respond to the pressures and strains of contemporary culture.  As part of this process, I build fragmentations in the organization of scientific knowledge that result in hybrids that demonstrate an ongoing clash between nature and artifice, between reality and fiction.

I am primarily interested in exposing the artifice that is implicit in any system of representation of living forms, revealing–and not concealing–the falsehood inherent to the process of construction of knowledge in modern times and its utopias. Thus, I question the logic and rational procedures that have always been applied to classification systems, including the management of collections at museums of natural history and their predecessors, the cabinets of curiosities.

A fundamental part of my proposal is the confrontation between the threatening poses of certain pieces, and the over-objectified aesthetics of specimens that have been transformed into decorative and playful artifacts, simultaneously producing fascination and rejection.

I try in this way, to subvert the usual aesthetic of museum dioramas, leading to the absurd notion of contextualizing the specimens in simulated natural environments. To some extent, my work can be understood as the construction of an artificial habitat for a heterogeneous network of bodies and fragments associated with a space that becomes a contradictory ecosystem, inert to natural processes.