Coyote Time refers to that moment in cartoons when the hero runs over the edge of a cliff, but only begins to fall when they realize they are in mid-air.

 

Vikenti Komitski's "That Moment When the Coyote Falls Off a Cliff" takes us to a landscape at the end of time in which nature and artifacts of industry undergo continual metamorphosis. The series of sculptures and assemblages is constructed from natural elements, found materials and scrap.

 

The exhibition draws several main axes of conflict - nature, culture and anti-nature, primary and derived, organic and man-made. At stake in the latter is our own extinction, but also the panic at the loss of our primordial gift of containing meaning.

 

At the heart of the narrative is the desire of humans to transcend and subjugate nature, to take over its, hers, demiurgic functions and replace her as God (a dead one, that is) for good. In this quest for infinite growth, everything unnecessary and no longer useful is being discarded.

 

Forced out of her habitat, nature has become a spirit. She is a soul, floating around, looking for a body to settle in, finding it in the metal constructions, the remains of the mechanics. These in turn, having spent centuries trying to imitate her, sooner or later become her, or at least versions of her.  It is in the stage of their destruction these objects, that we conventionally perceive as relatively ephemeral, come to resemble organic matter, whose fundamental characteristic is impermanence - a linear movement of being-towards-death.

 

The visual language of the works is an amalgam of two architectural fields: that of nature and that of the human vision of functionality (which often uses natural structures as models for its own), merging into one tissue, system of organs. The objects of nature - bones, horns, relics of the moment in which they served life - find themselves, on a plane with the debris of machines and objects for the construction of everyday life.

 

Vikenti Komitski's works form a new enclosed garden, where nothing is alive. However, inanimate matter does not enter  the stage of decomposition and decay (because what was never alive cannot die). On the contrary, it undergoes rampant transformations towards its own renewal, becoming other, almost as if it were defeating the original terrible fate of the creation, abandoned to the forces of 

the hostile environment. 

 

The garden has no need of soil, its organisms have their own synthetic roots and arteries. Under the sun of the new time, its inhabitants neurotically reflect its light, pupils narrowing painfully, reminding us that something is wrong, that this sun is other.

 

This garden of nature and industry is one from which man will not be expelled, but is also doomed to live in.