Elijah Ober: proto carrot
35.6 x 43.2 x 12.7 cm
Elijah Ober: proto carrot
February 7 - April 5, 2025
PROTO CARROT is a series of 3D printed resin flowers based on Queen Anne’s Lace. Some have a sinewy, animal presence; others, adorned with 5 pointed stars, take on an atmospheric pop-ness. Delicate butterflies perch on certain petals, freezing the scene in time. The flowers are delicate and complex, uncanny in their blend of naturalism and the synthetic. While their basic structure and distinguishing characteristics are based upon Queen Anne’s Lace, they are arranged in compositions that are self aware of their status as wall decorations. They orient themselves to face the viewer and gaze back.
An animated video depicts another version of the same flower, some petals deleted to reveal eyes and a mouth. The shot is close, and the light is bright and yellow, a disorienting summer afternoon glare. The face is animated by a motion capture performance set in slow motion, the effect being a feeling of attempted communication without transmission.
The title situates the flowers in their evolutionary context: Queen Anne’s Lace is the ancestor to the modern carrot. Another animated video depicts a carrot growing from a small, thin, pale root into a thick, gnarled, orange carrot. The video jumps every second, showing a different iteration – we are not watching a single carrot grow, but a survey of possible carrots evolving over generations.
This feeling of permutation is mirrored in the flowers, which, like the carrot video, are created with the help of procedural 3D modeling. This means that I did not manually place each vertex, but created a system that helped me generate the geometry based in response to guides and inputs. There is a subtle sense of evolution throughout the works, because I adjusted and changed the system over time, and composed each piece in response to the previous. However, their interactive, generated quality also gives the works a feeling of multiplicity, of existing as instances of the same entity.
This feeling adds to the slippery, digital quality of these works. I have always been drawn to the interplay of the synthetic and natural, and the potential for this interplay to unsettle beauty and and beautify a particular unsettlement. In this case, I believe the slickness of these works heightens their readiness to work as conduits: shortcuts between the digital and the ancient. ~ Elijah Ober
