Horses
2006
Peter Simpson
Ink stamps on wood fiber
I have long wanted to create a work that gives an ironic twist to the notion that horses were replaced by the mass production of cars. That old notion is ripe for reconsideration with the advent of animal cloning, or even the less spectacular development of mass farming techniques. This was the first piece addressing these issues that satisfied me. The breakthrough came when I realized that I needed to express something more than a simple protest against the mechanization of the natural world, a notion that too many artists have already expressed. This piece mobilizes some of the same sentiment, but the fading copies produced by my graduated stamping method give the reproduction a haunting incandescence, and even the fuller "original" seems incomplete, a statement of the political inadequacy of simple nostalgia.