I had an exhibition, which we began about three years ago, that involves the Louvre Museum in Paris. They house an archive of historical sculptures dating back to Greek and Roman and even Cycladic work before that. I gained access to molds that were made dating back to the 19th century of these classical works. And the molds are produced in the same way that I make molds of Pokémon objects here in the studio, so I requested permission to gain access to these molds, through some difficulty, with the French museum organization. They granted access, and then I began casting works that reimagined these historical sculptures, as if we’re viewing them from a thousand or ten thousand years in the future.

RMN is a facility in Paris that owns all of these molds. They create casts of these sculptures, typically for study, for school purposes or education. And basically what we’ve been able to do is, through the access to their molds, I’m able to create casts that use my materials, crystal, volcanic ash, and things of that nature. In order to do that, I had to send my team to Paris and actually cast within their facility. They were generous enough to allow access to these works but wouldn’t allow me to remove these molds from France, so everything is done there.

There is another sculpture in the exhibition which actually was originally sculpted by Michelangelo during the Renaissance, Lorenzo de Medici. It’s a curious figure, if you look at the position: he’s wearing armor, either going to a fight or a war, or he’s just returned from one. The elongation of the neck is very pronounced, and you have this sense that Michelangelo has taken liberties with the scale of certain parts of the figure. It’s slightly larger than real scale, and this work has been cast in blue calcite and a quartz crystal. This is one of the few works that I gained access to for which the sculptor is known so globally. The first work that I had access to from Michelangelo was a version of his Moses, which currently resides in the Vatican in Rome. It is interesting to reinterpret a sculpture that has such a wide understanding within an art historical context. It’s almost as if I can go back in time and alter that history.

I grew up drawing, sketching cars, cameras, and sneakers, things like that. I studied at Cooper Union in New York. Painting and drawing was a big part of that practice, and I when began sculpting, I often used drawing as a way to study the works. Some of the drawings are made before in anticipation, or as a thought process around building the sculpture, and others are created afterward, to reimagine. Drawing is a way of understanding an object in a way that you can’t always do just experiencing it visually.

Another work in the exhibition is a section of the bust of the Venus of Arles. This is an interesting work because it was discovered in the south of France, in Arles, and it was an ancient work that was broken into pieces with sections missing. It was restored at a certain point, back to what was considered to be its original state. Arms were added, and the head was positioned in a certain way. Because the arms were not originally present when they found the work, the sculptor had to guess what the Venus was holding. So in one hand she had a sphere which represents an apple, and in the other hand is a stem of what would have been a mirror. I like this work because it shows us that the idea of a sculpture dating back to antiquity is really through our own interpretation of it. The sculptor who added those components could never have known exactly what it was. All of these ancient works, because they’re fragmentary, are completed by us. We are the imagination that actually fills out the story behind them.

The general concept of a lot of these works is taking objects from our past or, in some cases, from our present that we have an understanding about, or we think we know, and then presenting them to audiences as if we are looking at them from the future. So perhaps we’ve traveled ten thousand years into the future, and we are seeing the remnant of our current civilization mixed with the past, and all of this history and time have been collapsed and blended together. There are erosions in the works which appear like the work is falling apart. We have the sense that something is decaying. But because the works are made of crystal, we may have the opposite impression. We could also think about them as growing, the crystal is something that we associate with formation and growth. So the question arises to us: is the work is falling apart, or is it growing together to some kind of completion? That opposing idea is really where the content of the work resides.

One of the major works in the exhibition is not the first thing you see when you walk into the show. It’s actually outside, in the back of the museum. It’s a massive sculpture of a bust of a female goddess who is partially collapsed, and it is sinking into the sand. So you have this sense that the complete figure may be resting underneath the ground, continuing. So when you are looking at this work, try to imagine the form underneath the surface of the sand, continuing down into the ground, as if this ancient work somehow ended up in this location and became buried. The relationship with the sand has a similarity to many of the works on the interior of the exhibition as well.