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Mark Dion

This installation by conceptual artist Mark Dion originated as a commission for the Smart Museum’s exhibition Ecologies (2000). The work on view resulted from an interactive performance in which the artist, sporting a naturalist’s costume, led a team of volunteers, including fellow artists, museum staff, faculty, and students, to collect insects from the crevices of the Smart Museum. Dion then set up a temporary laboratory in the galleries and worked with a University of Chicago microscopist to magnify and photograph the grid of specimens on display in the final installation. Dion wrote of this work, “Nature seems not to be found in the everyday, unless magnified. By shifting our focus, we can be reminded that we are inalienably part of an ecology—we are constructed by and construct the world around us.” By revealing the minute creatures that inhabit the museum, Roundup brings to attention the ecological forces that are present all around us but often invisible.

— Datura Zhou