Andrew Au is a fellow of infinite jest who takes infinite pains to commit his jests to paper. His show, the binarians, at Clay Street Press through Jan. 17, takes on a controversy that has been in local news as recently as last week when the Cincinnati Zoo, a scientific institution, caught heat for a joint tourism effort with Kentucky’s Creation Museum, which denies evolution.
For his text accompanying this show, Au has adopted an antique style, reflective of biblical pronouncements but also handy in sending up scientific jargon. He has so much fun with it that senses reel. This written accompaniment, he says in an introduction, is “a tongue-in-cheek expression of the Creationist claim that Evolution is itself a religion.” The introduction also lines out his use of “binarians” — a concept of opposing ideas — and sheds light on the positive and negative signs (“ ” and “-”) that appear on all the works.
To reduce Creation Museum-like anti-science to a point of absurdity, Au creates marvelous etchings and, for the fun of it, throws in a set of meticulously fashioned light-boxes and four laser-etched glass vessels containing what he calls “Digital Scrolls.” The religious-like “scrolls” are in fact the brightly colored wires of a USB drive containing images, bibliography, Web links and so forth relating to this show itself.
It is Au’s conceit that his etchings, looking like something an artist/engineer or highly talented biologist might turn out, illustrate the weird text he wrote to accompany them. The right side of each figure is the mirror image of the left, all in the mode of a scientific rendering.
Read a full review here.
This article appears in Dec 3-9, 2008.