Mimesis is an investigation into historic notion of art as reproduction, thrice removed from the 'real'. Plato gives us the example of a table to illustrate this point. According to Plato there exists somewhere, apart from the world of our experience, an ideal form of pure tableness. It is ideal because it contains within it the potential for all tables. When inspiration strikes and the artist begins to envision the possible tables that could be created, they are participating in a slightly corrupt version of the ideal form of tableness. Slowly the all inclusive, ideal form of tableness is winnowed away until the artist holds within their mind a specific version of a table. They draft a blueprint and gather wood. They work meticulously until a table exists in hard fact. In its specificness this physical table is less ideal, because it denies the endless variations that are contained within the ideal form of tableness. Thus, human thought and artistic re-presentation are, according to Plato, both forms of Mimesis, or imitation of the real (ideal).
​ Any table that can be pointed at is excluded from the category of Ideal Tabe. In this way, all of our signifiers seem only to relate to the

signified through a kind of negation. In Mimesis I have investigated this idea as it relates to Identity. There are a number of ways this investigation proceeds. 1)  Mimesis is stenciled across the bottom of the sculpture. This gesture overtly puts the issue of identity at the center of this work, because when the drawer is opened the M E of miMEsis is highlighted. This brings focus not only to the Me/myself, as subject portrayed, but also to the ME of the viewer. 2) This drawer contains a stack of mime gloves, which are meant to represent the many selves and personalities that reside in each of us. We don these personalities like gloves, but none of them is the authentic kernal of self so sought after by romantic modernists. Mimes inhabit and interact with a world that does not exist, or which exists only in the ideal, imaginative sense. 3) I've left eight physical imprints of my hands, set in concrete. This gesture is antipodal to that of the mime. Whereas the mime is the only presence through which we can glean the trace or outline of their imaginary world, here the world (the concrete and wood of the sculpture) is the only presence through which we can glean the physical trace of my hand, evidence of my existence. My presence is declared through a gesture of my absence. 4) The life-like painted self-portrait is an imitation of my face. The cardiovascular web references the intricacies of the human body, which replicate endlessly upon a template writ in DNA (a sort-of biological Ideal Form). My body, all bodies, then, are also a product of Memesis.