About

Drawing on his training as a scientist, Schmitz has created a complex new work in which he amalgamates the natural and the artificial, commenting on the rapidly changing relationship and interdependence of nature and culture.

This new installation, Artificia, evokes a contrived laboratory setting. The plants and “biotopes” assembled are drawn from disparate ecological contexts, blurring the distinction between indoors and outdoors. Video loops link these “artificial” environments to the underlying micro-biological processes and dynamics in plant metabolism, and to the resources enabling life …