How often we have all stood in the snaking line of an airport security check, shuffling incrementally towards the hulking form of a baggage x-ray machine and the invasive sweeping eye of a body scanner? Slowly but inevitably we are pushed forward like an animal on a processing plant conveyor belt, towards those machines which seem to sit inert, doing all their nasty business behind plastic walls and mysterious curtains. Bothered by an irrational anxiety that the alarm will sound and you won’t make it out of the other side.
The airport security check, banal in its familiarity yet ever unsettling, is the subject of Roxy Paine‘s latest large-scale diorama Checkpoint. The artist is again operating at the intersection of the organic and the mechanical, meticulously reproducing ominous security equipment and machinery in maple wood using computer modelling and hand-carving. The work, a room-sized installation with a shortened perspective, is the focal point of Paine’s larger exhibition Denuded Lens; the wood is stripped back, and so are we. Smaller-scale hybrid machine sculptures also feature in the exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, until 18 October.
Roxy Paine
Checkpoint, 2014
Maple, aluminum, fluorescent light bulbs,
and acrylic prismatic light diffusers
14 ‘ h x 26′ – 11″ w x 18’ – 7 1/2″ d
Roxy Paine
Scrutiny, 2014
Maple
Approx. 70 x 130 inches
177.8 x 330.2 cm
Roxy Paine
Checkpoint, 2014
Maple, aluminum, fluorescent light bulbs,
and acrylic prismatic light diffusers
14 ‘ h x 26′ – 11″ w x 18’ – 7 1/2″ d
Roxy Paine
Checkpoint, 2014
Maple, aluminum, fluorescent light bulbs,
and acrylic prismatic light diffusers
14 ‘ h x 26′ – 11″ w x 18’ – 7 1/2″ d
Roxy Paine
Machine of Indeterminacy, 2014
Maple
45 x 64 x 46 inches
114.3 x 162.6 x 116.8 cm
Roxy Paine
Intrusion, 2014
Maple
723 / 4 x 28 x 58 inches
184.8 x 71.1 x 147.3 cm
