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Assembled from hundreds of cutout plants and animals from repurposed textbooks, artist Andrea Mastrovito created a striking installation where a colony of bats clings to the ceiling, a flight butterflies swarm the gallery walls, and all matter of insects, mammals and plants intermingle across the floor. The sprawling artwork spans the realms of collage, diorama and trompe-l’œil and was inspired in part by H. G. Wells’ science fiction novel The Island of Doctor Moreau. Titled The Island of Dr. Mastrovito and The Island of Dr. Mastrovito II the piece was first installed at Governors Island in New York back in 2010 and again last year in a different configuration at Mudac in Lausanne, Switzerland. Via the artist:
His starting points for this site-specific work are the two most common forms of home recreation—books and television. The title of his installation refers to H. G. Wells’ famous novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, in which the archetypal “mad” scientist experiments upon animals in order to give them human traits. In this “Island,” the artist substitutes himself for the doctor, trying to instill a new life into that which was once alive in a different way (books from paper, paper from wood, and wood from trees). Mastrovito imagines that the outside fauna take control of the abandoned house and become its proper inhabitants. Approximately 700 books were brought under the artist’s knife to cut out real-size images of animals. This trompe-l’oeil, or paper diorama, also suggests the strength of images, the infinite possibilities that knowledge—through books—can give us in order to create and re-create the world that we can only imagine.
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