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Photo credit: Spike Mafford
“A copse (not a corpse) is a small grouping of trees. This piece was made using grouping of scraps from one of the Yeses. And I re-arranged them by playing the old Surrealist game The Exquisite Corpse, where one thing connects to the next without prior knowledge of what that connector actually looks like. I did a version of that here.
When I arranged the pieces together, I noticed that they made a rectangle, with a void in the middle. It seemed like a proto-armature…at least enough of one that I felt like I could explore what it might look like if it was made more intentional. At the time I was looking at a piece of thrift store art someone had given me, and I wondered if I could somehow make a version of that character holding a flower on the inside of the rectangle…and with a little convincing, it turned out I could. An observant viewer will note that the flower also looks like an ampersand in reverse. The end result seems to pay homage to thrift store tropes, which are really just Western Canon art tropes. I can spot several, but I will leave it to viewers to find their own. “
—Dan Webb