Courtney Johnson

SURVIVAL MACHINES
STATEMENT

My Survival Machines series is named for a 1976 quote by Richard Dawkins, Sociobiologist, who said:

Now they swarm in large colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world communicating with it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”

The series consists of hand-blown glass spheres ranging from 3 inch to 6 inch in diameter coated with photographic emulsion on the inside of the hollow spheres. Many of the spheres have alterations made during the glass blowing process, such as added silver leaf, aluminum foil, bubbles, and steel wool. The images of people and buildings fade into and out of focus as the viewer moves about the object, which becomes a representation of memory. The spheres become large-scale models of memory capsules located in the brain. Megan Voeller described by Survival Machines as the Florida Craftsmen Gallery in St. Petersburg, Florida in January 2008 as "an almost painfully poignant inscription/embodiment of memory. Indeed, if the globes weren't riddled with bubbles and other purposeful imperfections they would be cloyingly precious, but instead...they sound the ring of truth" (Voeller, "Highly Recommended? Yes," Art Squees. 21 January 2008. par.4). Referencing photography's strong hold on our culture's collective and individual memory, the Survival Machines also capture a visual representation of the limitations and fading of memories in our own head augmented by photographs.