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By Zoë Lescaze
ON A RECENT April afternoon, Marguerite Humeau set out to see some dinosaurs.
A long bicycle ride took the French artist from her East London apartment to Crystal Palace Park, where the first life-size sculptures of prehistoric animals debuted in 1854 and now loom out of the lush greenery with an air of incongruous self-importance. “They were supposed to be cutting-edge science at the time, and now they’re used to make fun of the Victorian era and its inaccuracies,” Humeau said on video chat, tilting her phone to better frame two potbellied, wildly off-base depictions of iguanodon. The bulky mausoleum-size reptiles stared back defiantly from an overgrown island, seemingly oblivious to their obsolescence. A few ducks waddled by as a nearby cellphone released a tinny ringtone — contemporary incursions on the pseudo-primordial scene.
The temporal mishmash amused the 33-year-old, whose eerie, biomorphic sculptures and installations often feature extinct species, ancient gods, ultramodern technology and mythical creatures of her own design. In exhibitions that variously evoke luxury cloning facilities, alien blood banks and primeval caverns, Humeau confronts viewers with bizarre sights: pink hippopotamus milk pumping through artificial veins; rose-colored carpets dyed with every chemical in the human body; bulging, voluptuous tangles of bronze inspired by manatee brains and Paleolithic Venus-style figurines. With their severe ridges and sensuous grooves, the works alternately evoke medical equipment, internal organs and distorted bones. “I always think about my projects, or the process of making them, as time machines somehow, and maybe space machines as well,” she said. “It’s about creating transitions between things that happened deep in the past, into the present and far in the future.”
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