Just Add Maggots is an ongoing series that merges the artists fascination with death with the need to collect/memorialize. The project takes many forms including sculpture, photography, video, installation, and theater.
The Museum Theater Production
In Fall 2009, the Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s theater department Dr. Rose Malague contacted me about consulting on her spring production of Museum, a satirical play written by Tina Howe in 1975. The play takes place in a prominent New York museum and parodies modern/contemporary art. My role started as an arts consultant, but quickly expanded into both designer and actor. I created six sculptures for the set design made by the fictious artist Agnes Vaag. Somehow I was also convinced to act as one of the “laughing ladies” in the production. The irony comes full circle as I make fun of my own art made for the play. Vaag has become one of my alter egos and I’ve continued to work with skulls, bones, teeth, feathers, and other organic/found materials.
Colette Copeland
Exhibitions
Shadow Boxes
Artist Statement
As my mother will tell you, my obsession with the macabre began in adolescence. In college, my roommate and I planned to publish a book about bizarre deaths. He religiously cut out strange death obituaries from the New York Post, while enlisting me to photograph illustrations for the book. In 1994, I spent a year photographing roadkill. While on road trips around the country, I searched for a diversity of species, unexpectedly flattened while trying to ‘cross the road’. People would often stop their cars, assuming that I was stranded on the side of the highway. When I revealed my true intentions, I always got ”that look”.
To my husband’s great dismay, my cherished possession (which unfortunately is not a gift from him) is a mummified bat received one Christmas from a friend, who understood if not shared my obsession with death. Since then, many people have gifted me with dead things—mouse skeletons, a mummified fox, an elk jaw, bird skulls, beetles, frogs and more. I transform the dead things into sculptures or tableaux photographs. This ongoing work merges my fascination with death, with my need to collect/memorialize.
When describing my personality, my neighbor likes to tell the story of how I gave her a get-well card featuring a photograph of a freshly dead frog. She mistakenly interpreted my sympathetic intentions as a premature death wish a.k.a. to croak. My 2004 video project entitled, Media Murders explored how history is recorded/preserved and what is forgotten/erased. I enlisted the same neighbor to assist me in creating interventions/alternative ‘memorials’ at the murder sites in our bucolic small town. After posing for a few chalk body outlines, she abruptly quit, declaring the project too morbid.
Embracing dark humor in my video work, Mydeath.com (a.k.a. how to plan a funeral in 90 seconds or less), (2007) humorously asserts the Internet as the ultimate commodified marketplace. In Ossa (2009), animator Christopher Dunkle and I created a magical dark underworld where skeletons came alive, enacting primal rituals.
In Mary Roach’s darkly humorous best-selling book, Stiff–The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, she states that there are many people who feel that ”to do anything other than bury or cremate the dead is disrespectful, which includes writing a book about them.” I’m guessing there will be those who feel the same way about this work, suggesting I am irreverent, a shockaholic or worse, suffering from psychotic dementia. To them I say—Please sample the French Onion Soup with Salmonella sauce.
