Skin & Bones (and horns and wings and feathers and spots and scales and teeth), performed at the Community/Performance conference, Bryant College, 2004, poster designed and printed 2004, installation view above from The New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2004
As part of his attempt to become a professional paleontologist, Chris has decided to examine dinosaur aesthetics. To this end, he distributed a number of drawings of dinosaur skeletons to passersby and asked them to draw the dinosaurs' exteriors on top. In this way, he hoped to see what kind of expectations people had for the aesthetics of various dinosaurs, and whether those expectations varied by species, e.g., were predators colored in more intense colors than herbivores? The subjects included artists, biologists, and "normal" people over a wide range of ages. This piece was installed by showing the drawings side-by-side with an analysis of the decisions the artists made and speculation as to their influences (movies? science books?) and intents.
Images of the drawings: The Complete Set | Detail 1| Detail 2 | Detail 3
Analysis of the Drawings (Note: In order to be able to present all the information legibly, I have saved this piece as a life-size PDF of the poster; it will take some time to download.)