Through observation and classification of the natural world, we attempt to know, contain, and control the universe we inhabit. The history of scientific classification and the natural history museum are fraught with interesting contradictions centralized around the struggle between individual subjectivity and the ideals of rationality. What parts of our psyche are revealed through the process of collecting and labeling? What hidden parts of us influence that process?

I catalog my own desires through the lens of science, hybridizing personal experience within science’s attempt to map it.

I confess some nostalgia for an age when the universe was conceived as fully knowable: a place in which everything could be named, noted, and displayed within a lifetime.  My art practice is a series of gestures towards transcribing that lost history, formed by recursive attempts at recreating antiquated scientific methods, collections, and displays that parallel current research in science and technology. By collapsing the past into current research, my hand-crafted scientific artifacts suggest possible future histories, and offer a lens for examining assumptions about the mind/body/self/society which subtly infect research paradigms.

Ultimately, I come up against the ephemeral nature of everything we try so desperately to label as true, or real, or tangible--a synaptic misfire and we can’t remember our own name,  a chemical gradient changes and suddenly we fall out of love. My projects are reference manuals tracing these epistemologies of longing, transcribed from within my own perverse natural history museum where the future and the past, the speculative and the historical fuse.

Adrian Van Allen
July, 2008