Holly Williams for Art-Sheep
When one walks into one of Andrea Mastrovito‘s exhibitions, he is instantly overwhelmed by a sudden burst of color and energy, as one observes the cluster of wildlife springing-or better yet-exploding in the midst of an otherwise bare and ordinary room. The Italian artist, in his installations The Island of Dr. Mastrovito and The Island of Dr. Mastrovito II, uses cut-outs of life-sized pictures of colorful flora and fauna to create buzzing and chaotic virgin “islands” in places like No Longer Empty in Governors Island, NYC and Switzerland’s MuDAC museum.
The artist’s titles refer to H. G. Wells’ classic The Island of Doctor Moreau, in which a “mad” scientist experiments with animals, trying to turn them into humans and in a sense Mastrovito strives through his creations to adopt this role himself, but with a different task: to give life to his hand-cut animals and let them claim the abandoned rooms for their own homes.
