Mark Dion is a serious collector of the natural world. His work as an artist pursues fieldwork with integrity and humor, emulating the tradition of the nineteenth-century naturalists who moved the laboratory outside to study living ecosystems in a more comprehensive way. Dion’s twenty-first-century version of fieldwork similarly involves close observation and specimen collecting, shadowing the methods and obsessions of an early explorer. Dion is quick to acknowledge that he is not a trained scientist; rather, he is an engaged naturalist who exhibits an ardent curiosity in the workings of the natural world. His broad exploration of how specimens are collected and classified by museums and zoological centers results in his own fantastic collections of curiosity, while raising questions about how natural history is understood in the western world. In this sense, his work as an artist mimics how institutions build knowledge, through the collecting, ordering, and preservation of things.
The portfolio Mark Dion recently produced with Tamarind was part of his western adventures through Texas, an extension of the two-year project hosted by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, titled The Perilous Texas Adventures of Mark Dion (Feb 8-May 17, 2020). For the Amon Carter project, Dion retraced the footsteps of several nineteenth-century explorers through Texas. His process digs into the oddities and the mundane, the vernacular and the overlooked specimens of culture. The project with Tamarind assembles 19 lithographs in a small wooden box, a tribute to the collecting tools and instruments that these explorers might have used. The Tamarind portfolio, titled Perilous Adventures Field Apparatus, was created in response to the Texas project, and included in the Amon Carter’s site-specific exhibition. Dion’s hand-drawn tools assemble a wry and endearing collection of the early explorer’s analog tool kit.
Dion has received numerous awards, including the ninth annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award, The Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Lucida Art Award. He has had major exhibitions at the Miami Art Museum; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Tate Gallery, London, and the British Museum of Natural History in London. “Neukom Vivarium”, a permanent outdoor installation and learning lab for the Olympic Sculpture Park, was commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum. Dion produced a major permanent commission, ‘OCEANOMANIA: Souvenirs of Mysterious Seas’ for the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco.
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